Reviews for Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry

The average rating for Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-19 00:00:00 Brandon Galloway Ōe Kenzaburō, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize, is one of my absolute favourite authors of all time. I have read all of his novels and novellas available in English, albeit a frustratingly high proportion of his overall works have yet to be translated, and would rank them: 1 The Silent Cry 2 Somersault 3 Death by Water 4 The Changeling 5 The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away included in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels 6 Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels 7 Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age! 8 A Quiet Life 9 A Personal Matter 10 Aghwee the Sky Monster included in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels 11 Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids 12 An Echo of Heaven 13 The Pinch Runner Memorandum 14 J/Sexual Human included in Seventeen & J 15 Seventeen included in Seventeen & J 16 Prize Stock included in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels (see also ) Yasuko Claremont's The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburō is the definitive English-language literary study of Ōe's fiction. It was published in 2009 after Ōe had written what he said would be his last novel "Farewell to my Books!", although as Claremont acknowledged, he had said this before and then carried on writing, and indeed Ōe did subsequently write further novels, including the excellent Death by Water. This is not a biography of Ōe, although Claremont does spend a few pages on his origins in order to show how: His early life contains the roots of several of his later themes: the village as an imaginary topography, expanding in its significance to encompass the nation and mankind's place in the cosmos; the vast forest, ever renewing itself; the power of mythology intertwined with historical folklore; uncertainty and betrayal as inevitable conditions of life; and the Emperor, no longer divine but still at the head of a centralist socio-political system dominating Japan. To those themes was, of course, added another key one when Ōe's first son, Hikari, was born brain damaged and with severe autism, albeit later becoming a highly successful composer (). In an interview in the Paris Review () Ōe "describes most of his fiction as an extrapolation of the themes explored in two novels: A Personal Matter (1964), which recounts a father's attempt to come to terms with the birth of his handicapped child; and The Silent Cry (1967), which depicts the clash between village life and modern culture in postwar Japan". The former "are rooted in Ōe's personal experience of Hikari's birth (the narrator is usually a writer), but the narrators often make decisions very different than the one Ōe and his wife made." The latter novels "explore the folklore and mythology Ōe heard from his mother and grandmother, and they typically feature a narrator who is forced to examine the self-deceptions he has created for the sake of living in a community. " In the Paris Review Ōe acknowledged that "the ideas in my novels are fused with the ideas of the poets and philosophers I am reading at the time" and this is key to Claremont's approach as she traces the key themes and influences that evolved through his lengthy writing career: - William Reich (the drives towards violence in the human personality) - Jean-Paul Sartre (freedom and responsibility) - Mikhail Bakhtin (cycles of perpetual regeneration and grotesque realism) and Mercia Eliade (archaic ontology) - Dante, William Blake and William Butler Yeats (spiritual renewal) - RS Thomas (the silence of the universe) - William Blake (brotherhood and friendship) and TS Eliot (the serenity of old age) One difficulty for the reader of Claremont's text is that some of the key novels that are discussed are not available in English, although she does an excellent job of explaining the themes and how these relate to the translated works. In particular as yet untranslated novels include The Contemporary Game, a novel of the greatest importance to Ōe focusing on his re-telling of the mythology of the founding of the Japanese nation, and the (simpler) re-write of the same story "M\T and the Wonders of the Forest" as well as the "Burning Green Tree Trilogy", and "Letters to My Nostalgic Years" where Ōe starts to insert himself as a character in his own books. My greatest frustration with this book however, was that Claremont comes across as much more of a fan of Ōe's philosophical journey that of his actual realised novels e.g. stating that the latter novels are long-winded, repetitious and can be tedious and praising instead his earlier, much shorter, novellas and his late-career children's stories: Unlike his fiction, with its density of detail, repetition and complexity, Ōe's children's stories are easy to follow and very impressive, making an impact on reader's with their sincerity. In particular she is no fan of one of Ōe's key methods, as he explained in the Paris Review So one of my main literary methods is "repetition with difference." I begin a new work by first attempting a new approach toward a work that I've already written'I try to fight the same opponent one more time. Then I take the resulting draft and continue to elaborate upon it, and as I do so the traces of the old work disappear. I consider my literary work to be a totality of differences within repetition. or as explained by Sanroku Yoshida in his article: "The burning tree: the spatialized world of Kenzaburō Ōe"Kenzaburō Ōe's works are highly self-referential. "One of the most salient characteristics of Ōe's major works is their interrelated nature: his themes continually recur, his characters reappear in several works under the same names, and episodes in works previously treated are referred to without explanation. The world of Ōe 's imagination is entirely holistic, which makes it impossible to discuss one particular work without touching upon another.Claremont's rather less appreciative response is: Often as one begins to read, apprehension leading to irritation and outright boredom can set in as the same symbolic incidents are recounted anew. The problem for Ōe and the reader is that in his narrative style of variation within repetition, which he actively adopted, the variations are diffuse and disconcerting (brilliant individual passages intermixed with perfunctory 'made-to-order' characterisation and substantial passages inserted reviewing his own books) and do not have the same overall impact as the core themes he persistently repeats. And the, to me, quite brilliant Somersault (a novel I have read and loved twice) is apparently an inordinately long novel, tedious in its repetitions, a point endorsed by its translator, Philip Gabriel in his critical study of the novel. Overall, a very helpful and comprehensive (at least up to the date it was written) introduction to Ōe's works, although I would have preferred more focus and enthusiasm for the novels themselves rather than the underlying philosophical ideas.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-10-07 00:00:00 Eugene Wilkerson It was written by academic language so it may be inconvenient to read fluently. But in general it contains interesting facts about love, romance, relation and those reflection to literature.