Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture by Seth Jacobowitz

Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, virtually all major lines of Western thought and the works of both major and minor Western philosophers have been explored and used by Japanese writers in an effort to forge a modern Japanese literature. The history of translation alone reveals a concern to bring over synoptic summaries of Western philosophy, as well as the primary works of specific thinkers. Academic philosophy as a discipline of advanced study was established in the 1880s, the decade which corresponds to the beginnings of widespread literary reform and the often-cited creation of the first modern Japanese novel, Futabatei’s Ukigumo (Floating Cloud) in 1889. However, Japanese novelists, dramatists, poets and critics did not assimilate philosophical influences naïvely or passively, nor was Japanese literature made over in the shape of specific Western ideas regarding the nature and function of the self, society or literary aesthetics. Indeed, the avid translation and discussion of Western ideas frequently provoked a nativist reaction or modification. The revival of traditional tropes, the language of Confucian ethics, Buddhist practice and Shintō legends), itself often reflects the pervasive presence of Western ideas on the modern literary scene.

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The Buddha of the North: Swedenborg and Transpacific Zen

Religion and the Arts ◽

10.1163/107992610x12598215383242 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 14 (1-2) ◽

pp. 1-33

Author(s):

Devin Zuber

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

North America ◽

William Blake ◽

Japanese Literature ◽

Modern Japanese Literature ◽

The North ◽

The Pacific ◽

Emanuel Swedenborg ◽

History Of ◽

The Buddha

AbstractThe Scandinavian scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) has had a curious relationship to the history of how Western literature has responded to Buddhism. Since Honoré de Balzac’s claim in the 1830s that Swedenborg was “a Buddha of the north,” Swedenborg’s mystical teachings have been consistently aligned with Buddhism by authors on both sides of the pacific, from D. T. Suzuki to Philangi Dasa, the publisher of the first Buddhist journal in North America. This essay explores the different historical frames that allowed for this steady correlation, and argues that the rhetorical and aesthetic trope of “Swedenborg as Buddha” became a point of cultural translation, especially between Japanese Zen and twentieth-century Modernism. Swedenborg’s figuration in the earlier work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Blake, moreover, might begin to account for the peculiar ways those two Romantics have particularly affected modern Japanese literature. The transpacific flow of these ideas ultimately complicates the Orientalist critique that has read Western aesthetic contact with Buddhism as one of hegemonic misappropriation.

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Tsubouchi Shōyō and the Beauty of Shakespeare Translation in 1900s Japan

Multicultural Shakespeare ◽

10.1515/mstap-2016-0006 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 13 (28) ◽

pp. 69-85

Author(s):

Daniel Gallimore

Keyword(s):

Small Group ◽

Detailed Analysis ◽

Japanese Literature ◽

Modern Japanese Literature ◽

History Of ◽

Stage Performance ◽

Tsubouchi Shoyo

In a recent study of Shakespeare translation in Japan, the translator and editor Ōba Kenji (14) expresses his preference for the early against the later translations of Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859-1935), a small group of basically experimental translations for stage performance published between the years 1906 and 1913; after 1913, Shōyō set about translating the rest of the plays, which he completed in 1927. Given Shōyō’s position as the pioneer of Shakespeare translation, not to mention a dominant figure in the history of modern Japanese literature, Ōba’s professional view offers insights into Shōyō’s development that invite detailed analysis and comparison with his rhetorical theories. This article attempts to identify what Shōyō may have meant by translating Shakespeare into elegant or “beautiful” Japanese with reference to excerpts from two of his translations from the 1900s.

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Race and the Rise of a Mass Visual Culture: The Case of David Hunter Strother’s Virginia Illustrated

American Literary History ◽

10.1093/alh/ajaa013 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 32 (3) ◽

pp. 446-479

Author(s):

Christopher Lukasik

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Visual Culture ◽

White Male ◽

Reception History ◽

Media History ◽

Literary Art ◽

History Of ◽

The Media ◽

Relationship Of

Abstract The publication of David Hunter Strother’s Virginia Illustrated under the pseudonym Porte Crayon in Harper’s Monthly (1854–56) provides a compelling case study through which to consider the role of race in the development of a US mass visual culture. The media combinations found within and the reception history of Virginia Illustrated demonstrate the importance of racialized viewing to the early success of Harper’s Monthly at a critical moment in media history. To be sure, Virginia Illustrated circulated racist stereotypes to be mass consumed, but the image/text operations of Strother’s literary sketches and illustrations also extended the privileges and pleasures inherent in the performance of the white male gaze to the expanding readership of Harper’s Monthly despite the differences in region, gender, and class of that audience. The case study of Virginia Illustrated challenges us to revisit the oddly marginalized relationship of nineteenth-century illustration to literary, art, and media history and invites us to situate nineteenth-century US literature into the wider media landscape of which it was undoubtedly a part.

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Stuttgarter Rede über Architektur

Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung ◽

10.28937/1000106357 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 97-104

Author(s):

Friedrich Kittler

Keyword(s):

Media History ◽

Media System ◽

History Of ◽

History Of Architecture

Der Vortrag schlägt vor, nicht mehr den Menschen als letzte Referenz und vertrauten Maßstab der Architektur zu setzen, sondern Architekturen als Mediensysteme zu denken. Eine noch ungeschriebene Mediengeschichte der Architektur sollte daher auch und gerade in historischer Absicht nach formalen Entsprechungen zwischen Techniken des Entwerfens und solchen der Bauten suchen, in denen Praxis und Produkt zusammenfallen. </br></br>The paper proposes the consideration of architecture(s) as a media system, instead of imposing man as its ultimate reference and known measure. A media history of architecture – which remains to be written – should therefore search for formal correspondences between techniques of drafting and those of buildings, in which practice and product coincide.

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