When Our Eyes No Longer See

Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism

Bibliographic Data

ID19153441
AuthorsMasami Yuki (Kanazawa University, corresponding author), M R Yuki
Year2009
Volume16
Issue4
Pages874-875
Publication date2009-06-19
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1076-0962 • E-ISSN: 1759-1090
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/isle/isp047
OpenAlexW2157916628
LanguageEN
Citations received3

“There is a way of knowing the world that reaches beyond the limits of the human body. I will call this mode of perception realism” (1). With this eloquent opening remark, Gregory Golley demonstrates the materialist and “non-mimetic” nature of a “realist” mode of knowledge in Japanese literature of the 1920s and 1930s, the time when Japan was experiencing a radical shift in knowledge associated with such scientific revolutionaries as Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel. Unlike the common understanding of Japanese modernization, Golley's book treats “the culture of modernity not as a product of the West, but as a product of industrialization” and the science that contributed to it (19). Therefore, his focus is on the creative yet contentious negotiations between literature and biological science. With works of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Yokomitsu Riichi, and Miyazawa Kenji as primary texts, Golley's close reading and interdisciplinary study of Japanese literary modernism illustrates how scientific realism, together with the development of technology and industrialization, transformed the meaning of “objective observation” and nurtured the “realist” impulse to reach out to that which “our eyes no longer see.”

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Literature · Materialism · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political science · Realism · Sociology · Technoscience · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy

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