Literature among the Ruins, 19451955: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism [Paperback]

In the wake of the disaster of 1945as Japan was forced to remake itself from empire to nation in the face of an uncertain global situationliterature and literary criticism emerged as highly contested sites. Today, this remarkable period holds rich potential for opening new dialogue between scholars in Japan and North America as we rethink the historical and contemporary significance of such ongoing questions as the meaning of the American occupation both inside and outside of Japan, the shifting semiotics of literature and politics, and the origins of what would become crucial ideological weapons of the cultural Cold War.

The volume consists of three interrelated sections: Foregrounding the Cold War, Structures of Concealment: Cultural Anxieties, and Continuity and Discontinuity: Subjective Rupture and Dislocation. One way or another, the essays address the process through which new Japan was created in the postwar present, which signified an attempt to criticize and reevaluate the past. Examining postwar discourse from various angles, the essays highlight the manner in which anxieties of the future were projected onto the construction of the past, which manifest in varying disavowals and structures of concealment.

Atsuko Ueda is associate professor of modern Japanese literature at Princeton University.

Michael K. Bourdaghs is Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

Richi Sakakibara is professor of modern Japanese literature at Waseda University.

Hirokazu Toeda is professor of modern Japanese literature at Waseda University.

This collection of essays by distinguished scholars on both sides of the Pacific is an excellent companion volume to The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 194552. The provocative essays take up the topic of literary criticism in postwar Japan and open it up to rigorous and multifaceted examinal'