Changing Song

The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu

Bibliographic Data

ID6083147
AuthorsAndrew E Barshay, Miriam Silverberg
Year1991
Volume17
Issue2
Pages475
Publication date1991-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Japanese Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0095-6848 • E-ISSN: 1549-4721
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/132774
OpenAlexW2137660902
LanguageEN
Citations received14

Nakano Shigeharu (1902-1979), leading twentieth-century Japanese poet and social critic, transformed the revolutionary culture movement of the 1920s. Positioning Nakano's thought within the very of Japanese Marxism, Miriam Silverberg applies textual analyses to his pre-war writings to form a new perspective on the of the politics and culture of the Japanese left. Her book relates Nakano to the Western Marxist tradition, recognizes the existence of a Japanese Marxist theory of commodity culture, and uses this theory to illuminate the era. In particular, Silverberg addresses how Nakano, like his European contemporaries, worked toward a critique of mass culture, illustrating how Japanese thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s adopted Marxism as the dominant method of political and intellectual inquiry. This book draws on Marx's writings and those of Georg LukNBcs, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Bertolt Brecht, and Mikhail Bakhtin to present Nakano as a Marxist critic and poet. Close readings of Nakano's essays, poems (most of them appearing for the first time in English), fiction, and prison letters trace Nakano's changing song or consciousness through four stages--from his discovery of history in the mid-1920s to his refusal to be silenced during the late 1930s, when he produced a series of scathing attacks on intensifying state repression

Linguistics · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci

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