Complicit Fictions
Title | Complicit Fictions PDF eBook |
Author | James A. Fujii |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 307 |
Release | 2023-09-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0520912403 |
In Complicit Fictions, James Fujii challenges traditional approaches to the study of Japanese narratives and Japanese culture in general. He employs current Western literary-critical theory to reveal the social and political contest inherent in modern Japanese literature and also confronts recent breakthroughs in literary studies coming out of Japan. The result is a major work that explicitly questions the eurocentric dimensions of our conception of modernity. Modern Japanese literature has long been judged by Western and Japanese critics alike according to its ability to measure up to Western realist standards—standards that assume the centrality of an essential self, or subject. Consequently, it has been made to appear deficient, derivative, or exotically different. Fujii challenges this prevailing characterization by reconsidering the very notion of the subject. He focuses on such disparate twentieth-century writers as Natsume Soseki, Tokuda Shusei, Shimazaki Toson, and Origuchi Shinobu, and particularly on their divergent strategies to affirm subjecthood in narrative form. The author probes what has been ignored or suppressed in earlier studies—the contestation that inevitably marks the creation of subjects in a modern nation-state. He demonstrates that as writers negotiate the social imperatives of national interests (which always attempt to dictate the limits of subjecthood) they are ultimately unable to avoid complicity with the aims of the state. Fujii confronts several historical issues in ways that will enlighten historians as well as literary critics. He engages theory to highlight what prevailing criticism typically ignores: the effects of urbanization on Japanese family life; the relation of literature to an emerging empire and to popular culture; the representations of gender, family, and sexuality in Meiji society. Most important is his exposure of the relationship between state formation and cultural production. His skillful weaving of literary theory, textual interpretation, and cultural history makes this a book that students and scholars of modern Japanese culture will refer to for years to come.
Complicit Fictions
Title | Complicit Fictions PDF eBook |
Author | James A. Fujii |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 307 |
Release | 1993-03-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0520077709 |
"James Fujii's Complicit Fictions is the first genuinely convincing study of the crucial relationship between the production of literature and the experience of history in the making of modern Japan. He has brilliantly, and with great intellectual originality, liberated the reading of modern Japanese prose narratives from an earlier, formalistic practice which had assimilated them to the requirements of the European realist novel, and thereby robbed them of their own particularity. As a replacement for the earlier critical program, he proposes a strategy that promises to restore the historical moment inscribed in the very act of narrative production. In making this move, he has, I believe, managed to bring these fictions back to Japan yet avoid reducing them to expressions of cultural exceptionalism. By showing us how the narratives of Shimazaki Toson, Natsume Soseki and Tokuda Shusei must be read for an enabling history which they invariably sought to repress, their historical unconscious, Fujii has given students of history and literature, in and out of Japan, a magisterial mix of critical sophistication and textual authority, rigorous thinking and stylistic elegance."—Harry Harootunian, University of Chicago "Unlike many literary studies that seek to be theoretical but finally prove merely tautological, Complicit Fictions is both genuinely theoretical and passionately engaged. It explains all that needs explanation, leaving little to quotations or citations. James Fujii is stunningly lucid and persuasively precise. Together with Richard Okada's Figures of Resistance and Naoki Sakai's Voices of the Past, this work will open a new era in the studies of Japanese literature."—Masao Miyoshi, University of California, San Diego
The Complicit Text
Title | The Complicit Text PDF eBook |
Author | Ivan Stacy |
Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield |
Pages | 231 |
Release | 2020-12-10 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1498598714 |
The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction identifies the causes of complicity in the face of unfolding atrocities by examining the works of Albert Camus, Milan Kunera, Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. Ivan Stacy argues that complicity often stems from narrative failures to bear witness to wrongdoing. However, literary fiction, he contends, can at once embody and examine forms of complicity on three different levels: as a theme within literary texts, as a narrative form, and also as it implicates readers themselves through empathetic engagement with the text. Furthermore, Stacy questions what forms of non-complicit action are possible and explores the potential for productive forms of compromise. Stacy discusses both individual dilemmas of complicity in the shadow of World War II and collective complicity in the context of contemporary concerns, such as the hegemony of neoliberalism and the climate emergency.
Complicit
Title | Complicit PDF eBook |
Author | Stephanie Kuehn |
Publisher | Macmillan |
Pages | 257 |
Release | 2014-06-24 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 1250044596 |
Jamie's mother was murdered when he was six, about seven years later his sister Cate was incarcerated for burning down a neighbor's barn, and now Jamie, fifteen, learns that Cate has been released and is coming back for him, blaming him for all the bad things that led to her arrest.
Complicit Fictions
Title | Complicit Fictions PDF eBook |
Author | James A. Fujii |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 287 |
Release | 1993 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780520077577 |
"James Fujii's "Complicit Fictions" is the first genuinely convincing study of the crucial relationship between the production of literature and the experience of history in the making of modern Japan. He has brilliantly, and with great intellectual originality, liberated the reading of modern Japanese prose narratives from an earlier, formalistic practice which had assimilated them to the requirements of the European realist novel, and thereby robbed them of their own particularity. As a replacement for the earlier critical program, he proposes a strategy that promises to restore the historical moment inscribed in the very act of narrative production. In making this move, he has, I believe, managed to bring these fictions back to Japan yet avoid reducing them to expressions of cultural exceptionalism. By showing us how the narratives of Shimazaki Toson, Natsume Soseki and Tokuda Shusei must be read for an enabling history which they invariably sought to repress, their historical unconscious, Fujii has given students of history and literature, in and out of Japan, a magisterial mix of critical sophistication and textual authority, rigorous thinking and stylistic elegance."--Harry Harootunian, University of Chicago "Unlike many literary studies that seek to be theoretical but finally prove merely tautological, "Complicit Fictions" is both genuinely theoretical and passionately engaged. It explains all that needs explanation, leaving little to quotations or citations. James Fujii is stunningly lucid and persuasively precise. Together with Richard Okada's "Figures of Resistance" and Naoki Sakai's "Voices of the Past, " this work will open a new era in the studies of Japanese literature."--Masao Miyoshi, University of California, San Diego
Title | PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 241 |
Release | |
Genre | |
ISBN | 0198910207 |
Complicit
Title | Complicit PDF eBook |
Author | Winnie M Li |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Pages | 416 |
Release | 2022-08-16 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1982190825 |
“Winnie M Li’s harrowing thriller…doesn’t sugarcoat her subject, nor should she.” —Elisabeth Egan, The New York Times Book Review After a long-buried incident, a woman whose promising film career was derailed has an opportunity for revenge in this visceral and timely thriller about power, privilege, and justice. A Hollywood has-been, Sarah Lai’s dreams of success behind the camera have been put to the wayside. Now a lecturer at an obscure college, this former producer wants nothing more than to forget those youthful ambitions and push aside any feelings of regret…or guilt. But when a journalist reaches out to her to discuss her own experience working with the celebrated film producer Hugo North, Sarah can no longer keep silent. This is her last chance to tell her side of the story and maybe even exact belated vengeance. As Sarah recounts the industry’s dark and sordid secrets, however, she begins to realize that she has a few sins of her own to confess. Now she must confront her choices and ask herself, just who was complicit?