“Modernity, Representation, and Imagetext in Natsume Sōseki”

• In Event: Cities of Word and Image: Multi-media in East Asian Modernities

Abstract

Natsume Soseki has been celebrated not only as one of Japan’s first modern authors, but also as one of its most productive critics of the various regimes that constitute modernity—including practices and theories of representation. This paper explores what W.J.T. Mitchell has called “ImageTexts” in Soseki’s writings: moments that deliberately blur the boundaries between verbal and visual modes of representation. In the face of modern discourses of art that devalued such forms as calligraphy that included both verbal and visual elements, Soseki seemed to delight in the deployment of mixed media works that troubled the boundary between the pictorial and the linguistic realms. This paper takes up the striking visual design elements that characterize many of Soseki’s publications, the depiction of painting in such fictional works as Sanshiro (1908) and Kusamakura (1906), the author’s extended review of the 1911 “Bunten” exhibit of contemporary paintings in Tokyo, and his reflections on the relationship between painting and literature included in his 1907 lecture, “The Philosophical Foundations of the Literary Arts” (Bungei no tetsugakuteki kiso).

Author

• Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago