This book easily qualifies as a "tour de force". It is both highly original, powerful, and sweeping. Although it easily qualifies as an "A" by my grading criteria, it is not without a few flaws, one of them serious.
Contents
The table of contents lists the following parts and chapters. The titles of chapter subsections are also listed but I have omitted them here.
Conventions
Introduction: Empire, Transculturation, and Literary Contact Nebulae
1 Travel, Readerly Contact, and Writerly Contact in the Japanese Empire
PART I: INTERPRETIVE AND INTERLINGUAL TRANSCULTURATION
2 Transcultural Literary Criticism in the Japanese Empire
3 Muliple Vectors and Early Interlingual Transculturations of Japanese Literature
4 From Cultural Innovation to Total War
PART II: INTERTEXTUAL TRANSCULTURATION
5 Intertextuality, Empire, and East Asia
6 Spotlight on Suffering
7 Reconceptualizing Relationships: Individuals, Families, Nations
8 Questions of Agency: Raising Responsibility, Parodying Persistence, and Rethinking Reform
Epilogue: Postwar Intra-East Asian Dialogues and the Future of Negotiating Transculturally
Reference Matter
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Dust jacket promotions
The front flap of the dust jacket describes Thornber's book like this.
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By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan's military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of people, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another's creative output.
Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers -- from such literary leaders as Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu, and Yang Kui, to lesser known figures -- discussed, adapted, translated, and intertextually recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan's cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collabor-ation [sic] but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.
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This is a reasonable summary of the book's objectives and even achievements. The enthusiasm of the three endorsements on the back of the dust jacket are also reasonable.
I generally concur in the appraisals of Thornber's work as "vital" and "groundbreaking" (Dennis Washburn) and "timely" and "uniquely important" (Michelle Yeh). I also partly agree with the characterization of its prose as "graceful" and "jargon-free" (Bruce Fulton).
Compared with a lot of current writing, especially about literature from a "critical" perspective, Thornber's discussions of specific writers and their works are relatively free of jargon. Yet parts of her introduction and other general discussions lean heavily toward jargon -- though, being a very clear and articulate writer, even her jargon is graceful.
Author
According to the back flap of the dust jacket, "Karen Laura Thornber is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University."
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Introduction
In grading Thornber's book an "A" I an saying it is "An excellent source with few serious problems". The singular most serious (if not the only serious) flaw in her book is its lack of a Rosetta Stone clearly showing how she has translated the contemporary past into her present-day version of the past, and thereby written certain facts out of "historiography" of literature in and around the Empire of Japan.
It is one thing to impose a present-day essentially "post-colonial" framework on a study of a colonial past, for whatever reason, including a desire to contribute to the ideological movement to "decolonialize" the historical regard for "former colonials" or "former semi-colonials". For one of the purposes of scholarly research is to imagine new (if not always better) ways of understanding the past.
But it is quite another thing not to recognize the raw complexities of past for what they were. In this regard, Thornber's descriptions of the "Empire of Japan" lack the veracity of "real" history -- by which I mean history red in tooth and claw, with all the warts and wrinkles, pimples and blemishes, and burps and farts that more and more scholars today are reluctant to clearly acknowledge.
Giving a clear account of the realities that were unpleasant to many people at the time, and are arguably unpleasant to even more people today, should not be taken to mean an apology for, or endorsement or justification of, imperialism and colonialism. Nor would such an account prevent the adoption of a theoretical framework in which unpleasant contemporary "facts" are transformed into more pleasant present-day "fictions" that serve the purpose of "facts" within the adopted framework.
RESUME
Refer to cover art as well as content of Introduction.
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Kim Saryang
Forthcoming.
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Chang Hyokju (Noguchi Kakuchu)
Forthcoming.
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