Lecture: Takeuchi Yoshimi, Literature, National Literature
February 13, 2002
Lecture: Takeuchi Yoshimi, Literature, National Literature
Dr. Richard Calichman (Research/Translation Fellow at the East Asian Institute, Columbia University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. & Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM
| Takeuchi Yoshimi, the postwar critic and Sinologist, devoted much of his thought to the question of literature. He saw in literature a site of openness to the world’s materiality, and in this way sought to redefine man as less an epistemological subject than an agent of action. Nevertheless, Takeuchi’s notion of literature as a site of openness comes to be greatly restricted through his elaboration of the notion of “national literature,” (kokumin bungaku). Here literature is seen as subsumed by the nation, such that it functions as the privileged vehicle through which the nation comes to be expressed. In this talk Dr. Calichman will show how Takeuchi’s notion of literature contradictorily leads to such a conception of national literature while at the same time opening up a path of “resistance” (teikô) to it. |
