ONE READER READING: THE LYRICAL NOVEL EAST AND WEST (JAPAN, UNITED STATES, ENGLAND)

Inspired initially by the work of Louise Rosenblatt who argues that the purpose of education is to provide an environment conducive to students' continuing reflection on their experience and who views literature as a principal means of exploring oneself and one's relationship with others, this study questions whether American students' exposure to Japanese literature which violates their underlying assumptions about human nature would reveal to them the influence their shared culture and unique personal experience have had on their values and beliefs, and invite them to critically re-evaluate these in light of other alternatives. Indeed, modern Japanese novels have consistently created difficulties for American readers in terms of their unique aesthetic, analogous to what Freedman has described in The Lyrical Novel as the reconciliation of the conventional novel with the instantaneous action of the lyric, and the unique nature of Japanese personality which they embody.;What my reading of novels by Hemingway, Lowry, Woolf, Kawabata, Mishima, and Abe revealed, however, was not an interpretation of the novels as objective entities, but, rather, an understanding of the conventions and feelings brought to these works by an American reader. As patterns emerged in my responses to the novels, my expectation that the complex, problematical relationship between reader and text can be a useful way of articulating at least a tentative sense of one's identity theme was confirmed. Indeed, I was extremely tolerant of ambiguity as long as my identity theme could be reconstructed in my reading, resulting in some highly idiosyncratic interpretations of the novels in question. In light of my research, however, I am skeptical about the possibility of modifying one's constructs as a result of increased awareness because I have seen how pervasive they actually are.;I have addressed this issue by examining my responses to Japanese fiction in the context of lyrical fiction from our own culture. This, I believed, would allow me to identify difficulties created by the genre alone before addressing the additional problem of an unfamiliar psychology. The focus of my reading was provided by the psychoanalytic perspectives of Norman Holland and Takeo Doi.