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Rating: Summary: A Sorely Needed Contribution Review: Cornyetz takes three seemingly disparate writers and shows how they are all implicated in the creation of the modern Japanese subject through a process of othering and abjecting the "dangerous woman". The book makes several sorely needed contributions. First, it brings rigorous critical vocabulary to a field that often uses loose, impressionistic language to talk about femininity in Izumi Kyôka (1873 - 1939), Enchi Fumiko (1905 - 1986), and Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992). Second, it reveals how more sophisticated recent criticism - especially on Nakagami - tends to erase gender as it becomes more theoretical. Perhaps most impressive, it steers clear of using feminism either to celebrate or condemn the texts themselves. Instead it highlights the ambivalent politics of their simultaneous reliance upon and interventions into the foreclosure of women's bodies and women's pleasures from Japanese modernity.The three authors receive four or five short chapters each. Those on Kyôka situate his nostalgia for mothers and enchantresses in relation to Meiji social, economic, political, linguistic and literary reforms. Those on Enchi focus on vengeful uses of the sacred and the profane by middle-aged women in the immediate post-war period, when state-sanctioned maternity was enforced anew to make non-reproductive female sexuality almost inconceivable. The chapters on Nakagami describe the author's treatment of 1960's jazz, the Buraku outcaste class, male homoeroticism, and pre-Buddhist oral tales. In each case Cornyetz draws from a range of recent and canonical writings to provide precise sociocultural and literary-critical contexts. These expository elements give her narrative a fine historical grain, delivering a great amount of information with authority and clarity. The book's main achievement is to draw these elements into a compelling account of why sexual excess, maternity, voice and the monogatari form are integral to each writer precisely in their systematic codings as feminine, and abject. Kyôka is often said to be fascinated with an erotic female other and at the same time "feminine" in his own prose style. Cornyetz argues that these "femininities" are not oppositional to but in fact devalued byproducts of the genbun'ichi consolidation of modern male subjectivity in a new phonocentric writing system. She demonstrates how a similar gendering of premodern language lies behind the "discovery" of an exotic, erotic, and necessarily absent Japan in a number of cultural projects, from Meiji ethnography to Edo kokugaku. Her discussion of Enchi pivots on the feminization of Heian literary genres. Drawing from important work by Mizuta Noriko, it shows how Enchi uses Heian "women's" writing to access a disruptive female rage that is always framed by the same phallocentric logic it is meant to resist. Of the three writers, Nakagami emerges as the most self-reflexive in his knowledge that the premodern "women's" voice is ultimately neither dangerous nor deadly. His identification of the male outcaste with the female other is the most ambivalent instance of "phallic fantasy" in the book.
Rating: Summary: Yes to feminist mediation! Review: In an age ruled by phallic, unilateral men who want things as they see it (Iraq or Japanese literature) without abstract mediations or filters of any kind (the United Nations or "French theory"), it's a pleasure to have this book in print. Here we have Japanese literature filtered lovingly through the most scintillating, abstract thought around. The result makes Japanese literature more delectable, not less. I love the way the author doesn't assume that there's a there (always already) there (like the "text itself" or Weapons of Mass Destruction) but rather reconstructs the object of Japanese literature in new and exciting ways. Foreplay is so much more fun than pre-emptive penetration, especially when it's being handled by a feminist committed to intelligent and abstract mediations. Long live feminist mediations!
Rating: Summary: Yes to feminist mediation! Review: In an age ruled by phallic, unilateral men who want things as they see it (Iraq or Japanese literature) without abstract mediations or filters of any kind (the United Nations or "French theory"), it's a pleasure to have this book in print. Here we have Japanese literature filtered lovingly through the most scintillating, abstract thought around. The result makes Japanese literature more delectable, not less. I love the way the author doesn't assume that there's a there (always already) there (like the "text itself" or Weapons of Mass Destruction) but rather reconstructs the object of Japanese literature in new and exciting ways. Foreplay is so much more fun than pre-emptive penetration, especially when it's being handled by a feminist committed to intelligent and abstract mediations. Long live feminist mediations!
Rating: Summary: Phallocracy 0, Lacan 1 Review: There's a fundemental problem with Cornyetz's book-- as she herself points out in the introduction, her work depends so heavily on the theories of thinkers such as Lacan and Foucault that not a whole lot of time was left for her to master her Japanese language skills. Her detractors point out that she has a limited knowledge of her subjects and a limited ability to read their work, which leads to a problem of credibility when drawing broad conclusions about their ouevre. Her supporters laud her for.... her mastery of the theories of thinkers such as Lacan and Foucault. The end result is a work that will teach readers interested in modern Japanese very little about the writers or the work that they produced, but will certainly be of value to those who wish to see Lacanian psychoanalytic theory applied to that work. No less a deconstructionist icon than Derrida liked to point out that there's nothing to literature beyond the text. The question, then, is what sort of work can be produced when the author's ability to read the texts she's critiquing is marginal at best. Too often, the analysis boils down to nothing more sophisiticated than 'if it's convex, it must be a phallus.' A university dean I know once told me "when the only tool in your box is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." This is certainly a comprehensive take on what French theorists might make of three Japanese authors of supernatural tales, but of little use to those seeking a comprehensive understanding of the life and work of three fascinating Japanese authors from unique backgrounds who penned some remarkable tales of the supernatural, Japanese society, and the nation's role in the modern world. The unfortunate treatment of these individuals here is a cliched attempt to "read" male Japanese authors as unwitting dupes of a society largely interested in the subjugation of women. If you'd like to learn more about the authors whose work is critiqued here, why not do the sensible thing and check out Charles Inouye's excellent translations of Izumi Kyoka in "Seven Gothic Tales," or Nakagami Kenji's short stories in "Snakelust." Make up your own mind-- after all, isn't that what an encounter with literature is all about?
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