The Aesthetics of Japanese Facism

1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-0-520-24505-1
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 368 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 671 g

Reihe: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

In this wide-ranging study of Japanese cultural expression, Alan Tansman reveals how a particular, often seemingly innocent aesthetic sensibility—present in novels, essays, popular songs, film, and political writings—helped create an "aesthetic of fascism" in the years leading up to World War II. Evoking beautiful moments of violence, both real and imagined, these works did not lead to fascism in any instrumental sense. Yet, Tansman suggests, they expressed and inspired spiritual longings quenchable only through acts in the real world. Tansman traces this lineage of aesthetic fascism from its beginnings in the 1920s through its flowering in the 1930s to its afterlife in postwar Japan.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tansman, Alan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Faschismus, Rechtsextremismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism

1. Modernist Beginnings: Akutagawa Ryjnosuke and Kobayashi Hideo

2. The Beauty of Violence: Yasuda YojjrQ's “Japanese Bridges”

3. Objects of the Sublime in Literary Writing: Yasuda YojjrQ, Yanagi S_etsu, Kawabata Yasunari, and Shiga Naoya

4. The Rhetoric of Unspoken Fascism: The Essence of the National Polity

5. Sentimental Fascism on the Screen: Mother under the Eyelids

6. An Aesthetics of Devotion: Kobayashi Hideo's Cultural Criticism

7. Filaments of Fascism in Postwar Times

Coda: Reading Fascist Aesthetics

Notes

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Alan Tansman is Agassiz Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Writings of Kôda Aya, a Japanese Literary Daughter and editor, with Dennis Washburn, of Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin McClellan.