Nina Cornyetz – författare

This book explores desire through the work of a new generation of Japanese women writers, in response to the increased attention these writers have received following the release of their work in the English language.

The contributions explore a wide range of theoretical approaches and psychoanalytic interpretations to "reading" a new generation of Japanese women writers’ relationships to identity, sex/gender, and desire. Through dealing with female spaces, maternal roles, gendered bodies, or resistant speech acts, the book uncovers the overarching theme of desire – desire for language, touch, and recognition. Focusing on authors who have previously been underrepresented in English-language scholarship, the book highlights the diverse nature and the important synergies of writing by women in the last few decades.

Addressing experimental and nonconforming authors whose works challenge gender and culture expectation as well as Orientalist myths, this will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Asian literature, Japanese culture, and Asian studies.

This book explores desire through the work of a new generation of Japanese women writers, in response to the increased attention these writers have received following the release of their work in the English language.

The contributions explore a wide range of theoretical approaches and psychoanalytic interpretations to "reading" a new generation of Japanese women writers’ relationships to identity, sex/gender, and desire. Through dealing with female spaces, maternal roles, gendered bodies, or resistant speech acts, the book uncovers the overarching theme of desire – desire for language, touch, and recognition. Focusing on authors who have previously been underrepresented in English-language scholarship, the book highlights the diverse nature and the important synergies of writing by women in the last few decades.

Addressing experimental and nonconforming authors whose works challenge gender and culture expectation as well as Orientalist myths, this will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Asian literature, Japanese culture, and Asian studies.

How did nerves and neuroses take the place of ghosts and spirits in Meiji Japan? How does Natsume Soseki’s canonical novel Kokoro pervert the Freudian teleology of sexual development? What do we make of Jacques Lacan’s infamous claim that because of the nature of their language the Japanese people were unanalyzable? And how are we to understand the re-awakening of collective memory occasioned by the sudden appearance of a Japanese Imperial soldier stumbling out of the jungle in Guam in 1972?

In addressing these and other questions, the essays collected here theorize the relation of unconscious fantasy and perversion to discourses of nation, identity, and history in Japan. Against a tradition that claims that Freud’s method, as a Western discourse, makes a bad ‘fit’with Japan, this volume argues that psychoanalytic reading offers valuable insights into the ways in which ‘Japan’ itself continues to function as a psychic object.

By reading a variety of cultural productions as symptomatic elaborations of unconscious and symbolic processes rather than as indexes to cultural truths, the authors combat the truisms of modernization theory and the seductive pull of culturalism. This volume also offers a much needed psychoanalytic alternative to the area studies convention that reads narratives of all sorts as "windows" offering insights into a fetishized Japanese culture. As such, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese literature, history, culture, and psychoanalysis more generally.

How did nerves and neuroses take the place of ghosts and spirits in Meiji Japan? How does Natsume Soseki’s canonical novel Kokoro pervert the Freudian teleology of sexual development? What do we make of Jacques Lacan’s infamous claim that because of the nature of their language the Japanese people were unanalyzable? And how are we to understand the re-awakening of collective memory occasioned by the sudden appearance of a Japanese Imperial soldier stumbling out of the jungle in Guam in 1972?

In addressing these and other questions, the essays collected here theorize the relation of unconscious fantasy and perversion to discourses of nation, identity, and history in Japan. Against a tradition that claims that Freud’s method, as a Western discourse, makes a bad ‘fit’with Japan, this volume argues that psychoanalytic reading offers valuable insights into the ways in which ‘Japan’ itself continues to function as a psychic object.

By reading a variety of cultural productions as symptomatic elaborations of unconscious and symbolic processes rather than as indexes to cultural truths, the authors combat the truisms of modernization theory and the seductive pull of culturalism. This volume also offers a much needed psychoanalytic alternative to the area studies convention that reads narratives of all sorts as "windows" offering insights into a fetishized Japanese culture. As such, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese literature, history, culture, and psychoanalysis more generally.

This is an innovative, scholarly and original study of the ethics of modern Japanese aesthetics from the 1930s, through the Second World War and into the post-war period. Nina Cornyetz embarks on new and unprecedented readings of some of the most significant literary and film texts of the Japanese canon, for instance works by Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kôbô and Shinoda Masahiro, all renowned for their texts'' aesthetic and philosophic brilliance.

Cornyetz uniquely opens up the field in a fresh and controversial way by showing how these authors and filmmakers'' concepts of beauty and relation to others were, in fact, deeply impacted by political and social factors. Probing questions are asked such as:

This ground-breaking work is truly interdisciplinary and will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature, film, gender, culture, history and even psychoanalytic theory.

This is an innovative, scholarly and original study of the ethics of modern Japanese aesthetics from the 1930s, through the Second World War and into the post-war period. Nina Cornyetz embarks on new and unprecedented readings of some of the most significant literary and film texts of the Japanese canon, for instance works by Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kôbô and Shinoda Masahiro, all renowned for their texts'' aesthetic and philosophic brilliance.

Cornyetz uniquely opens up the field in a fresh and controversial way by showing how these authors and filmmakers'' concepts of beauty and relation to others were, in fact, deeply impacted by political and social factors. Probing questions are asked such as:

This ground-breaking work is truly interdisciplinary and will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature, film, gender, culture, history and even psychoanalytic theory.