| Oe Kenzaburo is generally known as a writer whose themes and styles have been changing constantly over the half-century. However, a review of his writing career will reveal that Oe Kenzaburo completed the process of taking up literature, groping for the right form of literary representation for himself through failures, and, finally, striking a course of his own, along which he established his unique literary thinking and methodology in the first decade of his writing (the 10 years between the publication of The Miraculous Work, his maiden work, and The Silent Cry, bis master piece). Thereafter, his writing has never left its established course despite the so-called changes in theme and style.This dissertation maintains that Oe Kenzaburo completed, in the 10 years of his literary creation, the turn from an enlightener to a culture critic, and that cultural criticism has since become the top melody of his writing. What must be made clear is that the concept of enlightenment here has nothing to with the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, m this dissertation, it is no more than the extemalization of Oe Kenzaburo's thinking, and the so-called cultural criticism reveals the very importance of Oe Kenzaburo as an intellectual.For further division of Oe Kenzaburo's early writing, I think there should be 3 stages. The first stage covers the 2 years from The Miraculous Work to Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, The 5 years around Our Times make up the second stage. The third stage includes the 3 years from A Personal Matter to The Silent Cry. Oe Kenzaburo writing in the first stage clearly demonstrates his sense of enlightenment. The dissertation treats of this stage in Chapters One and Two. The second stage is a period of exploration in which in which Oe Kenzaburo made attempts to discover a new discourse of enlightenment. This will be covered in the second half of Chapter Two and the first half of Chapter Three. At the third stage, Oe Kenzaburo reestablished the course of his literature after his explorationand failure, forming his unique literary and methodology. This period witnessed a change in Oe Kenzaburo's enlightenment from the outside to the inside, from the external to the internal, showing no lack of self-enlightenment. Thereafter, the sense of cultural criticism manifested itself and gradually gained momentum. The dissertation will discuss all this in the second half of Chapter Three and Chapter Four.Judging from the surface, Oe Kenzaburo's early works are, for the most part, concerned wich the condition of the age individual relations in terms of oppression. But, in fact, when Oe Kenzaburo portrayed those who gave up resistance under imprisonment, he intended to arouse "the sense of danger" in the people. He had a negative attitude toward the Japanese who yielded to the American might but oppressed their weaker fellow countrymen. This attitude was more a criticism of Japan's status quo and the Japanese nationality than a mere dissatisfaction with the existence conditions of the Japanese. Through his works, Oe Kenzaburo also stressed the importance of the individual's subjectivity as an independent being in such an age and such existence conditions. Meanwhile, he made clear the frailty of Japanese democracy under the perpetuated rule of Mikados and the violence imbeded in the rule itself. All this gave expression to Oe Kenzaburo's enlightenment, hi his thinking, enlightenment points to the autonomy and self-determination of the modem persona rather than the development of the populace's intellectual resources and their political and economic consciousness. The aim of Oe Kenzaburo's enlightenment is to establish, by introducing the democratic spirit and using it for reference, a system of reflective cultural criticism, thereby achieving the reshaping of the cultural persona, hi short, the aim is to solve cultural crises through cultural criticism.Upon entering the world of letters, Oe Kenzaburo once firmly expressed his decision to involve hi politics through literature. When the new cons... |
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