Seth Jacobowitz - Böcker

Modern Japanese Literary Studies brings together a broad range of interdisciplinary and institutional perspectives on the state of the field and presses for overdue recognition that Japanese literature is not only a national or East Asian literature, but also deserves equitable representation in the humanities. Modern Japanese literature today is read in unison with colonial and postcolonial literature, women’s literature, LGBTQ+ literature, diasporic literatures, Indigenous literatures, visual cultures, and disability studies, and has made innovative contributions across the humanities.Bringing together sixteen scholars from North America, Asia, and Europe, this volume addresses Japan’s place in global modernity and world literature; the changing definition of the literary within the national canon and area studies configurations; the increased prominence of manga and visual media studies; heightened sensitivity to issues of race, gender, sexuality, and LGBT studies; and the advent of ecocriticism, among other emerging paradigms. The primary objective of this book is to assess the field’s study, teaching, research, and cataloging practices and identify challenges and opportunities for growth that lie ahead for the field amidst the ongoing crises that are reshaping the contemporary academic landscape.

Modern Japanese Literary Studies brings together a broad range of interdisciplinary and institutional perspectives on the state of the field and presses for overdue recognition that Japanese literature is not only a national or East Asian literature, but also deserves equitable representation in the humanities. Modern Japanese literature today is read in unison with colonial and postcolonial literature, women’s literature, LGBTQ+ literature, diasporic literatures, Indigenous literatures, visual cultures, and disability studies, and has made innovative contributions across the humanities.Bringing together sixteen scholars from North America, Asia, and Europe, this volume addresses Japan’s place in global modernity and world literature; the changing definition of the literary within the national canon and area studies configurations; the increased prominence of manga and visual media studies; heightened sensitivity to issues of race, gender, sexuality, and LGBT studies; and the advent of ecocriticism, among other emerging paradigms. The primary objective of this book is to assess the field’s study, teaching, research, and cataloging practices and identify challenges and opportunities for growth that lie ahead for the field amidst the ongoing crises that are reshaping the contemporary academic landscape.

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan boldly rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture from the perspective of media history. Drawing upon methodological insights by Friedrich Kittler and extensive archival research, Seth Jacobowitz investigates a range of epistemic transformations in the Meiji era (1868–1912), from the rise of communication networks such as telegraph and post to debates over national language and script reform. He documents the changing discursive practices and conceptual constellations that reshaped the verbal, visual, and literary regimes from the Tokugawa era. These changes culminate in the discovery of a new vernacular literary style from the shorthand transcriptions of theatrical storytelling (rakugo) that was subsequently championed by major writers such as Masaoka Shiki and Natsume Sōseki as the basis for a new mode of transparently objective, “transcriptive” realism. The birth of modern Japanese literature is thus located not only in shorthand alone, but within the emergent, multimedia channels that were arriving from the West. This book represents the first systematic study of the ways in which media and inscriptive technologies available in Japan at its threshold of modernization in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century shaped and brought into being modern Japanese literature.

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan boldly rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture from the perspective of media history. Drawing upon methodological insights by Friedrich Kittler and extensive archival research, Seth Jacobowitz investigates a range of epistemic transformations in the Meiji era (1868–1912), from the rise of communication networks such as telegraph and post to debates over national language and script reform. He documents the changing discursive practices and conceptual constellations that reshaped the verbal, visual, and literary regimes from the Tokugawa era. These changes culminate in the discovery of a new vernacular literary style from the shorthand transcriptions of theatrical storytelling (rakugo) that was subsequently championed by major writers such as Masaoka Shiki and Natsume Sōseki as the basis for a new mode of transparently objective, “transcriptive” realism. The birth of modern Japanese literature is thus located not only in shorthand alone, but within the emergent, multimedia channels that were arriving from the West. This book represents the first systematic study of the ways in which media and inscriptive technologies available in Japan at its threshold of modernization in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century shaped and brought into being modern Japanese literature.

This edited volume assembles a wide array of writings by Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, one of 20th-century Japan’s foremost intellectuals, translated for the first time into English. It begins with an introduction by the editors, Seth Jacobowitz and Aaron William Moore, that contextualizes Hirabayashi’s significance as a non-doctrinaire Marxist cultural critic, visionary thinker, and much-beloved popular fiction writer. The ‘Short Stories’, features a selection of Hirabayashi’s literary work, including science fiction (‘The Artificial Human’), detective fiction (‘This is How I Died!’), and more idiosyncratic works such as ‘Demon at the Pulpit’, an antitheist and anticlerical story.The ‘Essays’ provides a range of groundbreaking critical and theoretical tracts that address such topics as ‘The Social Basis of Modernism’, ‘The Feminisation of Culture’, ‘Political Value and Artistic Value: A Re-Appraisal of Marxist Literary Theory’, ‘Film as a Mechanism of Americanization’, ‘The Technological Revolution in Literature and the Arts’, and many more. Hirabayashi’s systematic approach to cultural theory befitting the era of massification in the 1920s places him front and centre in the hothouse intellectual climate of pre-war Japan. It also affords striking parallels to the leading thinkers in Europe such as Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, thereby forming an integral part of the history of global modernity.