Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780674032842)

This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902-1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s.

Kobayashi sought in criticism a vehicle through which to rhetorically restore to the artistic work an aura of concreteness that precluded interpretation and instead inspired awe, to somehow recover a literary experience unmediated by intellectual machinations. In adhering firmly to this worldview for the duration of World War II, Kobayashi came to assume a complex stance toward the wartime regime. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control.

Treating Kobayashi's influential works and the historical context in which they are rooted, James Dorsey traces the emergence of a modern critical consciousness in conversation with such concerns as the nature of materiality in capitalist culture, the relationship of narrative to subjectivity, and the nostalgia for beauty in a time of war.

Author: James Dorsey
ISBN-10: 0674032845
ISBN-13: 9780674032842
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2009
Pages: 275
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 10/09/2009 pg. 16
Choice 03/01/2010