Toward the end of the shosetsu, 1887--1933

In this dissertation I narrativize the history of the modern Japanese novel (shosetsu) from 1887 to 1933, from the initial conceptual reception of the modern western novel in the mid-Meiji period to its formal completion/exhaustion, a sublation of the genre into a different species, i.e., the monogatari (storytelling, or, lit., telling things). In doing this, I risk reducing the empirical and historical multiplicity of both the notion and numerous particular products of the shosetsu : the writers, critics, and texts I have selected for analysis are not as sufficiently many as to be general and comprehensive; nor do I give sufficient reference to the secondary literature on them. The reason I take such a risk is because I put more emphasis on the narrative effect of my thesis that is no longer carried out effectively on the terrain of implied audiences (scholars and literary intellectuals). Those I have wishfully in mind are ones who are still interested in the old notion of critical intervention regardless of their specific ideological locations.; The writers and critics I discuss in my dissertation---Futabatei Shimei, Tsubouchi Shoyo, Futabatei Shimei, Mori Ogai, Ozaki Koyo, Natsume Soseki, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, and few others---are therefore not meant to be the particular representatives of the various key stages in the history of the modern Japanese novel. I rather take them as singular and irreducible cases whose generalization into a narrative bypassing their particularities is justified and measured only by the effect the narrative ultimately invokes---a sense of totality, a vision which is always historically contingent and is always a product of contingent actual effort by an individual mind. Thus, abstractly speaking, the vision as I try to see it in my dissertation, as well as the variety of visions as imagined by the concerning writers, are the very question of intervention (to be more concrete, on a national level), to which the problems of the shosetsu, agency, the culture/society division, etc., are all reducible where my thesis is concerned.