| This dissertation explores the interactions between Japanese and French avant-garde movements, focusing on Dada and Surrealist literary works and manifestos of the 1920s and 30s, in order to consider the ways these movements are transferred, transplanted, or transported from one place to another, one language to another. Questioning and reconsidering metaphors of influence that have been used to discuss the interactions between Japanese and French literature, this project works with alternative models of memory and citation to examine the process by which a movement from one culture is recalled, cited, and (not without a shock) transplanted into another.;The dissertation includes analysis of selected texts by Takiguchi Shuzo, Nishiwaki Junzaburo, Kitasono Katsue, and others whose work was associated explicitly with the Surrealist movement in Japan. Because the effect of these ideas extends beyond those writers most commonly affiliated with these movements, this project also incorporates readings of other experimental works which reflect interactions with French literary avant-gardes, and considers the little-known Surrealist contributions of two Japanese women writers. Examining closely particular moments of encounter between French and Japanese poetry and poetics, I trace the rhetoric of resistance to various aspects of Japanese Surrealist writings, and explore the interval, gap, or horizon that opens within the space of Japanese Surrealism in relation to questions of visuality, temporality, and poetic meaning. Furthermore, I argue that a vision of alterity, a foreign space located somewhere "beyond," plays a crucial role in formulations of avant-garde praxis for both the Japanese and French contexts. An exploration of Japanese notions of the Surreal, calling for a rereading of received notions and presuppositions about French avant-gardes, leads to a reconfiguration of this period written less in terms of a narrative history of literature than as the non-linear route of a multivalent dialogue. |
