Crossing the Lines: Masao Miyoshi's Trespasses

Trespasses presents a most valuable selection of critical essays from a highly significant literary critic and public intellectual: Masao Miyoshi (1928-2009). A Japanese-born scholar whose first works concentrated on English literature and then moved to Japanese studies and, finally, to broad social and academic criticism, Miyoshi was, I believe, at heart a comparatist, albeit in his own unique way. This collection gives us a fine sense of his range and his critical method. That he eschewed strict disciplinary boundaries and conventions was shaped by his life, his personal style, and his politics. These essays trace his intellectual trajectories across and between national cultures, guided by an unwavering attention to historical location and purpose.

I first met Masao Miyoshi in the late 1970s at Berkeley. It was sobering for me to read his account of those times in this volume. Yes, it was called the Oriental languages department (as Miyoshi indicates, OL for short, or, as we students called it, "Oh, Hell") and housed in the former law-school building, Durant Hall. The student lounge was dedicated to the eminent linguist Yuan-ren Chao and his wife, the physician and later author of books on the preparation and consumption of Chinese food, Buwei Yang. The gold placard above the entrance read, "The Chaos Room." What Miyoshi writes is perfectly true—in those days, many of us advanced undergraduate and graduate students were hungry not only for theory but for any critical perspective that might in some way present another angle onto literary studies, especially of "the Orient."

At that time, faculty who could provide that were few and far between, so we formed our own reading groups, bought titles from presses such as Éditions du Seuil, and read the Poétique series and the magazines Tel Quel and Gylph. This was before Representations was a twinkle in Stephen Green-blatt's eye. Masao Miyoshi was not only someone who could talk to us about Marxism, historical materialism, and a demystified notion of East Asia; he also had the personal brashness and the politically active, iconoclastic stance to which many of us aspired. He was so close to our interests and sequestered right next to us in Wheeler Hall. Yet disciplinary boundaries, not to mention professional jealousies and turf wars, made it impossible for Miyoshi to be formally appointed in OL, and those who did work closely with him were, as he recounts in these pages, marked pejoratively by his antagonists as his students.

The title of the book is taken from a great stanza usually expunged from US campfire performances of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" (1912) (although wonderfully and conspicuously reinstated by Arlo Guthrie at the 1994 Kennedy Center celebration of Pete Seeger):

As I went walking, I saw a sign there,And on the sign it said, "No Trespassing."But on the other side it didn't say nothing.That side was made for you and me.

The essays illustrate the kinds of transgressive moves Miyoshi made during his long, fruitful career—across cultural, national, intellectual, academic boundaries—that established his unique style. But it would be wrong to focus solely on these invasive and disruptive actions—Miyoshi was equally attentive to locating himself, and the subjects of his investigations, in history, time, and place. There is a kind of restless energy in these essays, indicating that these trespasses both explore terrain where one does not properly belong and seek to register what kinds of knowledge are produced in these transgressive acts. As he crosses these disciplinary lines, the author constantly reflects upon his own situation and the cultural and historical location from which he speaks.

His deep concern with the ways the academy does and does not demonstrate a commitment to useful knowledge shows in each of his essays. How much do disciplines, "experts," "authorities," departments aid in the production of knowledge and...