@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12896},
      author = {Hou, Jue},
      title = {The Life of the Flesh: Transwar Japan and the Crisis of  Sensibility},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {This dissertation studies a lineage of Japanese writers  and intellectuals who turned toward corporeal sensibility  as a site of critical potentiality in moments of  ideological disorientation. In the aftermath of Japan’s  defeat in WWII, the political theorist and intellectual  historian Maruyama Masao (1914-1996) wrote of the  characteristics of Japanese literature: “[T]he minds of our  writers cling like leeches to natural, sensual phenomena,  and lack a really free flight of the imagination, so in one  sense all of our literature is ‘carnal.’” This purported  prominence of sensuality over detached scrutiny, Maruyama  proceeds, contributed to a lack of critical reflexivity in  times of political oppression, ultimately rendering Japan  vulnerable to fascism. At once proclaiming Japanese  literature’s excellence in capturing corporeal sensibility  and decrying its alleged paucity in “ideas,” Maruyama’s  cultural essentialism feeds into a plethora of discourses  continually reified and contested by both Japanese writers  themselves and a global readership that gradually accrued  after the war. In lieu of a wholesale dismissal, however,  my project recalibrates the affordances, both aesthetic and  political, of Japanese literature’s attentiveness to  corporeality during the tumultuous early decades of the  Shōwa period (1925-1989). I do so by examining the writings  of authors who resorted—often at moments of profound  political and personal crisis—to corporeal sensibility as a  productive site that resists full containment within  ideology. Along these lines, I follow three generations of  Japanese writers as the question of embodied life  (seikatsu) became no longer self-evident but took on  existential weight during times of intense political and  intellectual setbacks. The writers are the modernist  Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927); the Marxists Kobayashi  Takiji (1903-1933) and Nakano Shigeharu (1902-1979); and  the postwar democratic thinkers and critics of fascism  Maruyama Masao (1914-1996) and Takeuchi Yoshimi  (1910-1977). Born roughly a decade apart from one another  in the 1890s, the 1900s, and the 1910s, each of the three  generations engaged with dominant ideologies of their  times. In turn, they each struggled to come to terms with  defeat when these ideologies became untenable and risked  being “overcome” by new ones: when culturalist modernism  (kyōyōshugi) was feverishly denounced by the proletarian  movement during the transition between the Taishō and Shōwa  eras in the late 1920s; when Marxism faced escalating  government crackdowns and found itself powerless against  the rise of fascism during the 1930s; and when, in the wake  of Japan’s surrender, liberal democracy, imposed by the  U.S. occupation forces and sustained by what became known  as the postwar regime (sengo taisei), was believed to have  settled accounts with the nation’s fascist past. During  these critical moments, as I will demonstrate, the body as  the locus of both thinking and feeling—hence a liminal  sphere of indistinction between the ideological and the  pre-ideological—became for these authors a crucial  territory that had to be reconfigured as a vehicle of  resistance.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12896},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12896},
}