Japanese modernism and the destruction of literary form: The writings of Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, and Kawabata

This thesis presents an analysis of Japanese modernist fiction of the 1920s and early 1930s, with an emphasis on the writings of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Yokomitsu Riichi, and Kawabata Yasunari. The literary discourse of this period was dominated by the which was expressed specifically as a fundamental questioning the genre o the novel. While the novel had been the dominant genre of modern Japanese literature, it came under assault at this time from new technical media and the resurgence of other literary forms. Modernist fiction can be characterized in turn as performing the internal collapse of the novel. I analyze the disintegration of literary form and its relationship to the representation activity and national identity in the literature of this period.;While discourse on the I-novel was characterized by an attempt to inscribe the I-novel into a uniquely Japanese tradition and to outline the boundaries of a "pure" literature, modernist fiction, in contrast, represented the destruction of the generic boundaries of the novel. In effect, modernist writers attempted to dissolve the boundaries of interiority and individual identity that had been constructed in Taisho literature an to engage the fluid, shifting outlines of modern culture.;This is illustrated by the works of Akutagawa, Yokomitsu and Kawabata. While Akutagawa is rarely discussed in terms of modernism, his experimentation with a diverse range of genres in his late work, as well as his exploration of the disintegration language and consciousness, provide a context for the literary experiments of Yokomitsu and Kawabata. In Shanghai, Yokomitsu explored questions of national identification within the mixed, heterogeneous environment of the colonial city. In turn, Kawabata explored the carnivalesque site of Asakusa in Asakusa Kurenaidan, a work that is a collage of diverse literary and non-literary genres. Kawabata's work reveals the ultimate destination of modernism, as the collapse of forms of literary representation within a cultural field whose borders were perceived to be in the process of dissolution.