Toward Sublime Beauty: Politics of Aesthetics in Modern Japanese Literature, 1870-1947
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Date
2021-11-23
Authors
Tokuyama, Chie
Journal Title
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
The study explores the relationship between modern Japanese literature and the notion of Beauty (bi), the element that was purported to be the sole object of artistic exploration in the modern philosophy of art. In the 1870s, literature (bungaku) was newly introduced from the West as one of the artistic categories of the fine arts, whose only purpose was to arouse in the beholder the pleasure of Beauty. The study asks what Beauty meant and signified, what roles the pleasure of Beauty played in society, and why the philosophical debates justifying the value of Beauty emerged in parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism and continued to persist well into the 1940s. By recontextualizing the origin and the development of modern literature in the theoretical framework of aesthetics (bigaku)—the branch of scientific study on the perception of Beauty, this study goes back to the basics. It excavates the understudied discourse of Beauty that set forth the fundamental agenda of modern literature.
The study demonstrates that the aesthetic quest for Beauty was a philosophical investigation of the pathway leading to transcendence, a sublime state attaining self-effacement by aligning oneself with the morality of Nature. By claiming disinterestedness in both moral and utilitarian concerns of the sociopolitical domain, aesthetic notion of Beauty prevented intervention of ethical value systems external to the boundary of art. The study demonstrates that in its place, morality immanent in Nature was invoked as the locus of the good, wherein Beauty and Nature became morally allied and identical. To align oneself with the morality of Nature was to seek the timeless universal human experience within the particularity of the self. Hence, the study argues that Beauty was a politically-charged ideology of aesthetics that aimed at re-uniting the vanishing bond of organismic communities.
The study begins by examining the rise of the discourse of Beauty in the 1870s and traces its development up to the 1940s. It re-analyzes the major literary movements (i.e. Romanticism, Naturalism, and Modernism) from the perspective of modern writers’ aesthetic quest for the timeless essence of Nature=Beauty and scrutinizes its shifting meanings and symbols.
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Keywords
aesthetics, beauty, Japanese literature, nature, sublime, transcendence