As the new year begins, I'm delighted to hold in my hands the first copy of Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, a new volume of translations of Natsume Soseki's essays on literary theory that I co-edited with Atsuko Ueda and Joseph Murphy. It's the culmination of a project that began six years ago and that also produced a special issue of the journal Japan Forum, which came out last spring.
I'm hopeful this book will appeal to a wide variety of readers, not just specialists in Japanese literature. There is something intrinsically fascinating about Soseki's attempt to mount a fully scientific theory of literature, one that would comprehend both Western and Eastern traditions. The project was simultaneously brilliant and insane, and it came out of nowhere: a young unknown Japanese scholar (it was only later that Soseki would become Japan's best-loved novelist) closeted himself away in his London boarding house in the opening years of the twentieth century, determined to overthrow the existing establishment of literary criticism and reestablish the discipline on mathematical foundations. If nothing else, the sheer audacity of the gesture is worth savoring.
The new volume contains extended translations from Bungakuron (Theory of Literature, 1907), the main text in which Soseki spelled out his system. It also includes a number of later essays and lectures in which Soseki revisited his project. The project may have ended in failure, and yet what a brilliant failure! Soseki clearly anticipates formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory and other approaches that would become standard tools of literary criticism in the decades after his work appeared. That this lightning bolt originated in Asia rather than Europe or North America only adds to its appeal.
Please check it out. You can order the volume directly from the publisher (Columbia University Press) here, or you can order it from Amazon.com here (they still list it as a pre-publication order; no doubt that will change in the near future).
