Natsume SOSEKI, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings
(édité par Michael Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda et Joseph A. Murphy)
Irvington, Columbia University Press, 2009, 304 p.
ISBN 9780231146562
RÉSUMÉ
Natsume Soseki, widely held to be Japan's greatest modern novelist, infact began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of Englishliterature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. Soseki would later critique Theory of Literatureas an unfinished work, but the text remains an unprecedentedachievement, anticipating by decades the ideas and concepts that wouldform the critical foundations of formalism, structuralism,reader-response theory, cognitive science, and postcolonialism.
Employingthe cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology,Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience ofreading, as well as a theory for how the process changes over time andacross cultures. By insisting that literary taste is socially andhistorically determined, Soseki was able to challenge the superiorityof the Western canon, and by grounding his theory in scientificknowledge, he was able to claim a universal validity.
Along with Theory of Literature,this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in whichSoseki continued to develop his theories—some of which have neverbefore been translated into English. In addition, the editors of thebook provide a critical introduction contextualizing Soseki'stheoretical project in history and exploring its contemporary legacy.
BIOGRAPHIE
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the Meiji Era, known for his books Kokoro, Botchan, and I Am a Cat.
Michael K. Bourdaghs is associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism and the translation editor of Kamei Hideo's Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature.
Atsuko Ueda is assistant professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment.
Joseph A. Murphy is associate professor of languages, literatures, and cultures at the University of Florida and author of The Metaphorical Circuit: Negotiating the Gap Between Literature and Science in Twentieth-Century Japan. His recent work concerns the cognitive basis of narrative comprehension and includes an article in the volume Cognition and Literature, forthcoming from Yale University Press.