iv Japanese Contributions

Japanese scholarship on American literature published in 1999–2000 is as productive as ever, its variety a good indication of our concern with the complex diversity of literary studies at the turn of the new millennium. The centennial year of Hemingway's birth saw two collections of essays, and EigoS issued a special number on the writer. The year 2000 marks a commemorative year for two other writers, Thomas Wolfe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The centennial year of Wolfe's birth produced a collection of essays on a writer to whom too little attention is usually paid; the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Scarlet Letter was commemorated in another EigoS special number.

Limited space forces this review to be selective, and with a few exceptions I focus on single-authored books and on collections of original essays devoted to specific topics and themes. Articles mentioned appear in the major journals—EigoS, SALit, and SELit. Unless otherwise indicated all books are published in Tokyo.

a. Literary History and Criticism

The multicultural world in the post-colonial age lends itself to re-examination of national identities and by extension to national literary histories. Re-reading/writing of American literary history continues, this year in Shimpan America Bungakushi [A New American Literary History: From the Colonial to the Postcolonial], ed. Keiko Beppu and Kazuko Watanabe (Kyoto: Minerva); the third volume of Shunsuke Kamei's America Bungakushi [American Literary History] (Nan'un-do); and Takayuki Tatsumi's America Bungakushi no Kii Waado [Key Concepts in American Literary History] (Kodansha-Gendaishinsho). The first is an extensively updated revision of American Literary History: From Colonial to Postmodern Writings (1989), an informative and useful text which went through nine printings during the '90s. Kamei's American Literary History is an impressive compendium of his lectures given at the University of Tokyo; the complete set makes a unique narrative, recounted from the scholar's point of view, of the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of American literature. The slimness of Tatsumi's Key Concepts is quite deceptive because the pocket-size paperback is an intricate jigsaw puzzle of American literature deconstructed and restructured around Tatsumi's seven key concepts: Colonialism (formerly Puritanism), Puritanism (Republicanism), Republicanism (Romanticism), Romanticism (Realism), Darwinism (Naturalism), Cosmopolitanism (Modernism), and Postamericanism (Postcolonialism). Tatsumi here applies the same strategic reading of American literature tested earlier in his New Americanist Poetics (see AmLS 1995, p. 491).

More important is Tatsumi's Matafoh wa Naze Korosareru: Gendai Hihyo Kogi [The Metaphor Murders: Lectures on Contemporary Criticism] (Shohaku-sha), a critical feat performed by our most influential scholar/ critic writing today. As its subtitle suggests The Metaphor Murders is a collection of lectures given at Keio University and of reviews of works of literary criticism and theory contributed to academic journals over the past decade. Part 1 of the book, "The Polemics of Contemporary Criticism," maps out the critical debates and controversies staged by four influential theories—deconstruction, New Historicism, postcolonialism, and queer reading; Part 2, "The Curriculum of Contemporary Criticism," taking up half of the volume, introduces in reprinted reviews Jonathan Culler, Barbara Johnson, Cynthia Chase, Jane Tompkins, Walter Benn Michaels, Catharine Stimpson, Hideyo Sengoku, and Koji Oi; Part 3, "The Canon of Contemporary Criticism," features Harold Aram Veeser, Anthony Easthope, Thomas Mitchell, Ann Douglas, Hisao Kanaseki, Shunsuke Kamei, Masao Shimura, Gregory S. Jay, and Harriet Hawkins. The list of works reviewed totals 34 books, including 12 by Japanese scholars, some of whom have been introduced in AmLS essays. The inclusion of two reviews by Japanese women is noteworthy: Minako Saito's "One Red among the Green: Heroines in Animations, Films, and Biographies" and Yumiko Murakami's "The Yellow Face: The Hollywood Image of the Asians." Quite illuminating is Tatsumi's discussion of literary studies after postcolonialism, which problematizes the rigidity of the object/subject relation in literary/cultural criticism. Focusing on the notion of exoticism exploited by the shifting arbitrary demarcation of the "orient" and the "occident," he provides the intriguing example of Alan Brown's Audrey Hepburn's Neck (1996) to explain the internalized "orient" in Japanese culture, which needs to create "the occident" as "the...