Japanese Contributions, 2005–2006

Japanese contributions to American literary studies for this period are just as remarkable as ever, with significant single-author books devoted to diverse individual writers from the 19th century to the present, as well as collections of original essays on specific themes and topics. Eigo Seinen offers such special forums as “The Representation of Women in the American Novel” and “Murakami Haruki’s America” and occasional special features on individual authors (Henry James, Truman Capote, and Saul Bellow, in particular). Also worthy of note in the current period is the publication of book-length studies dealing with critical and literary theories that have exercised such a tremendous influence in Japan for more than two decades, highlighted by Gendai Hihyoriron no Subete (An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theories), ed. Yoichi Ohashi (Shinsho-kan). Two distinctive features of the Japanese contributions mentioned here are an immense interest in Southern literature and an ongoing concern with the gender issue and women writers. As usual, limited space forces this review to be selective, and priority is given to single-author books and collections of original essays on specific themes. With a few exceptions articles are restricted to those appearing in the major academic journals Eigo Seinen (EigoS), Studies in English Literature (SELit), and Studies in American Literature (SALit), to which list is added for this review Journal of American Literature Society of Japan ( JALSJ ), the English-language version of SALit. Unless otherwise indicated, all books are published in Tokyo.

a. Literary Theory

Concise as it is, An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theories is also sophisticated and comprehensive. It consists of three well-planned sections: “Themes,” 33 entries treating New Criticism through cultural studies; “Theorists,” compact profiles of 103 important theorists accompanied by their photographs; and “Critical Terms,” 55 carefully selected items of specialist vocabulary, incisively explicated. The editor’s introduction, addressing the problem of literary studies in the post-theory age, is astute and clever, exhorting students “to forget literary theories and read the text; otherwise you will never read the novel”—a golden rule of literary studies at all times. Toshikatsu Murayama, Mienai Yokubo ni mukete: Kuia Hihyo tono Taiwa (Squaring with Invisible Desires: A Dialogue with Queer Theory) ( Jimbun-shoin), collects eight of the author’s essays published in various journals over the past decade, organized into three sections: “Reading the Invisible Desires,” “Disruption of and Invasion into Privacy,” and “Psychoanalysis and Queer Theory.” Murayama examines the value of such works as Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), and Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek’s Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000) in the reading of Anglo-American novels. His discussion of the interaction between Sedgwick’s homoeroticism and Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” is most persuasive. Squaring with Invisible Desires is a sensible critique of queer theory.

Kanjo no Karuchararu Sutadiizu: “Sukurutini” no Jidai kara Nyurefuto Undo he (Cultural Studies of Sentiments and Emotions: From “The Scrutiny” to the New-Left Movement) (Kaibun-sha) by Yuzo Yamada consists of six original essays and one reprinted essay, accompanied by a prologue and an epilogue. Yamada, who like Murayama is a young scholar, explores the close relationship between Anglo-American literary studies and the “cultural studies” movement. The critic sees the origin of this movement in Raymond Williams’s idea of “connections” and “common culture,” which goes back to the time of the journal Scrutiny and to such British scholars as E. P. Thompson and Richard Hoggart. Further, the author examines the source and developments of cultural studies as practiced by Japanese scholars in articles and essays appearing in Eigo Seinen, Japan’s oldest literary journal (founded in 1898). Yamada’s book traces a genealogy of English literary criticism in Japan, and it is the first extended study in Japan of Williams’s critical and fictional works in the postcolonial milieu. Here a few words of reference to the EigoS special feature on Raymond Williams (151: 710–30) are appropriate. Contributions by five professors (including Yuzo Yamada) make [End Page 505...