A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For Sōseki, literature was a means for thinking through--and beyond--private property. Bourdaghs puts Sōseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentarō, author of Japan's first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kōjin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Sōseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.

Author: Michael K. Bourdaghs
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 09/24/2021
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.71lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9781478014621
ISBN10: 1478014628
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Asian | Japanese
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory

About the Author
Michael K. Bourdaghs is Robert S. Ingersoll Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, coeditor of Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia's Cold Wars, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop.