Imaginary Worlds and Real Ethics in Japanese Fiction: Case Studies in Novel Reflexivity

by Christopher Weinberger

Overview

Can novels contribute to the ethical lives of readers? What responsibilities might they bear in representing others? Are we ethically accountable for how we read fiction?

This study takes up modern Japanese fiction and metafiction, subjects overwhelmingly ignored by Anglophone scholarship on novel ethics, to discover pioneering answers to these and other questions. Each chapter offers new readings of major works of modern Japanese literature (1880s through 1920s) that experiment with the capacity of novel narration to involve readers in ethically freighted encounters.

Christopher Weinberger shows that Mori Ogai and Akutagawa Ryunosuke help to address key issues in new ethical theories today: debates about the roles that identification and empathy play in novel ethics; concerns about the representation of “otherness” and alterity in novels; divergence between cognitive and affective theories of ethics; widespread disagreement about what novel ethics obtain in the experience of reading, the effects of reading, or the form or content of novel representation; and, finally, concerns with bias and appropriation in the study of world literature.

Concluding with a jump to the present, Imaginary Worlds and Real Ethics in Japanese Fiction puts on display a startling continuity between the methods of Japan's modern novel progenitors and those of novelists at the forefront of global literature today, especially Haruki Murakami. Ultimately, this book models an original approach to ethical criticism while demonstrating the relevance of modern Japanese fiction for rethinking contemporary theories of the novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798765105412
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	01/25/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	945 KB

About the Author

Christopher Weinberger is Associate Professor of Comparative World Literature and founder and Program Coordinator of Video Game Studies at San Francisco State University, USA. He teaches narrative and literary theories in Japanese and Anglophone traditions and has contributed to Novel and Fault Lines of Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2018), among other publications. He is currently writing for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms.
Christopher Weinberger is Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature and Program Coordinator of Video Game Studies at San Francisco State University, USA. He teaches narrative and literary theories in Japanese and Anglophone traditions and has contributed to Novel, Fault Lines of Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2018), and other publications. He is currently writing for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
Introduction
- Case Studies
1. Critical Contexts: Modern Japanese Theories of the Novel
- Critical Contrasts: Ogai and Akutagawa
- Ethics, Aesthetics, and Self-Consciousness in Mid-Meiji Theories of the Novel
2. A Framed Narrator: Ironic Perspective in The Dancing Girl
- A Man of Letters
- Ogai's Dialectic Vision: Ethical Self-Overcoming in Critical and Novel Discourse
- Reflexive Narration in The Dancing Girl
3. Who is Ogai Gyoshi?: Authorial Desire and Ethical Self-Reflection in the Aughts
- The Self-Remaking of Ogai in the Aughts
- Who Is Ogai Gyoshi?: Fictions of Authorial Selfhood
- Vita Sexualis and the Ethics of Self-Reflection
- A Monologic Dialogism: Reflexive Critique as Ethical Posture
4. Triangulating an Ethos: Ethical Criticism, Novel Alterity, and Mori Ogai's “Stereoscopic Vision”
- The Culmination of an Ethics of Self-Consciousness
- The Wild Goose's Formal Ethics: Complicities of Novel Perspective
- A Colonizing Imagination: Suezo as Reader
- Ogai's Ethical Aesthetics
5. Akutagawa's Affective Ethics
- An Ethics beyond Understanding
- From the “If” of Reason to the “As If” of Stories: The Novel Ethics of “Rashomon”
- An Affective Ethics
6. The “Real” Tears of Fictional Readers: Akutagawa's “Green Onions”
- The Unreal Ethics of Mimetic Worlds
- Lyrical and Narrative Ethics
- “Real” Readers and Fictional Emotions
- Real Effects of Fictional Affect
7. A Novel Theory of Literary Affect
- An Art of Aporia
- Storied Failures: Critical Orthodoxy on Akutagawa's Late Fiction
- A Novel Theory of Literary Affect: Akutagawa's Late Writing on Shosetsu
8. Haunting Failures: The Transmission of Alterity in Akutagawa's Late Writing
- A Haunted Life within Literature
- A Fool's Life-within-Literature
- The Author as Icarus
- A-Sensei and the Transmission of Affect
- The Haunting Alterity of Akutagawa's Final Shosetsu
9. Imaginary Worlds and Real Ethics: The Case of Murakami Haruki
- The Immanent Ethics of Murakami
- Murakami Criticism and the Fantasy of Realism
- Alterity and Oscillation in New Ethical Theories of the Novel
- Fractal Realism and the Ethics of Transpositioning
- Into Wonderland: Models of Reading
- Out of Wonderland: Modes of Reading
- The Fantasy of Realism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

A sophisticated and compelling study that reveals the crucial rhetorical role narrative reflexivity plays in the fiction of several major figures of modern and contemporary Japanese literature. Weinberger not only provides fresh perspectives on important individual novels, but also makes a significant contribution to ongoing discussions of the ethical claims of fiction in a globalized literary environment.” —Dennis Washburban, Burlington Northern Foundation Professor in Asian Studies, Dartmouth College, USA

“Against a critical tradition that has read Mori Ogai, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, and Murakami Haruki as having failed to conquer their personal demons and live up to the ethical and political challenges of their respective historical moments, Weinberger writes with a refreshing and radical premise: that these Japanese writers have something vital to teach us and that it is the critic's job to elucidate what that is. The result is a brilliant, full-throated articulation of the value of literary reflection on real-world problems.” —J. Keith Vincent, Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature, Boston University, USA

From the Publisher