Alan Tansman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520245051
- eISBN:
- 9780520943490
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520245051.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Kobayashi Hideo was the pivotal Japanese critic of his time. The progenitor of literary and cultural criticism in Japan, Kobayashi blended serious reflection on aesthetics, literature, history, and ...
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Kobayashi Hideo was the pivotal Japanese critic of his time. The progenitor of literary and cultural criticism in Japan, Kobayashi blended serious reflection on aesthetics, literature, history, and politics with a poet's sensibility. His intellectual reach was immense: from Buddhist aesthetics to European classical music; from the entire history of Japanese and European literature to sculpture, pottery, and painting; from the politics of literature to the literature of war; from poetics to European and Asian thought. This chapter shows how Kobayashi, through his vertigo-inducing prose, and his particular version of the fascist moment, did his part in seeding an atmosphere of aesthetic fascism.Less
Kobayashi Hideo was the pivotal Japanese critic of his time. The progenitor of literary and cultural criticism in Japan, Kobayashi blended serious reflection on aesthetics, literature, history, and politics with a poet's sensibility. His intellectual reach was immense: from Buddhist aesthetics to European classical music; from the entire history of Japanese and European literature to sculpture, pottery, and painting; from the politics of literature to the literature of war; from poetics to European and Asian thought. This chapter shows how Kobayashi, through his vertigo-inducing prose, and his particular version of the fascist moment, did his part in seeding an atmosphere of aesthetic fascism.
Alan Tansman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520245051
- eISBN:
- 9780520943490
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520245051.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This chapter considers the close connection between modernism and fascism in Japan. It discusses how Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's modernism displays the origins of a distinctly Japanese fascist aesthetic. ...
More
This chapter considers the close connection between modernism and fascism in Japan. It discusses how Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's modernism displays the origins of a distinctly Japanese fascist aesthetic. Though Akutagawa died before Japan's entry into war and totalitarianism and never married those aesthetics to a politics of violence or death, we might wonder still whether his aesthetics would have led to such a politics. It is argued that Kobayashi Hideo's modernism, so richly informed by Akutagawa's, made that very turn.Less
This chapter considers the close connection between modernism and fascism in Japan. It discusses how Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's modernism displays the origins of a distinctly Japanese fascist aesthetic. Though Akutagawa died before Japan's entry into war and totalitarianism and never married those aesthetics to a politics of violence or death, we might wonder still whether his aesthetics would have led to such a politics. It is argued that Kobayashi Hideo's modernism, so richly informed by Akutagawa's, made that very turn.
