With a capacious definition of cognition that includes thoughts, feelings, imagination, and memory, this book examines and analyses cognitive manifestations of a wide range of feeling from affect, emotion, to sensibility in a selection of modern Japanese novels and the readerly emotions that they produce to reflect on the ethical implications of reading literature.
The novels, some of them very canonical, are by four male authors (Natsume Sôseki, Shiga Naoya, Ôe Kenzaburô, and Ibuse Masuji) and five female authors (Kirino Natsuo, Kawakami Mieko, Murata Sayaka, Tsushima Yûko and Ishimure Michiko) from the early twentieth century up to the present. Under the rubrics of genre, affect and trauma, the book addresses themes related to genre experiments and sensibility in the early twentieth century (Part I) and representation of affect, emotion, and trauma in the selected novels (Part II and III), nine chapters altogether.
Methodologically speaking, the book’s aim is to rejuvenate other more established cultural theories through a cognitive lens (genre theory, historicism, cultural study, and gender theory). The rationale behind it is a belief in a holistic approach to literary analysis that takes advantage of whatever theories that are suitable for the texts in question—with the new cognitive approach as a source of inspiration.
- Reiko Abe Auestad is Professor of Japan Studies at the University of Oslo.