Avant-garde Realism

Focusing on Avant-garde realism in Kobo Abe's works, the paper sets out to explore how Kobo Abe developed his worldview and how reality was represented in his works from a perspective of reality, with an aim to study how Kobo Abe understood and represented reality in unique angles and methods.The body of this paper consists of two parts. Based on the theory of cognition, the first two chapters analyze how the avant-garde and unique reality came into form in Abe's work.The first chapter explores the influences that various schools of thoughts had on Abe and his writing career by reviewing the post-war dissemination of surrealism, as well as activities organized by a certain avant-garde arts group. How Abe absorbed and rejected surrealism is at the center of discussion. Besides, Abe stressed the reality of literature and its forms of expression. He dialectically criticized the traditional realism represented by I-novel and proletariat literature, coming up with the so-called "neo-reportage" in efforts to establish new forms of reality representation. Various post-war trends of thoughts converged and made it possible for Abe to have a methodological breakthrough.The second chapter highlights Abe's shift of focus: in his middle-period and later works, one can notice that Abe converted his understanding of reality into concrete understanding of the metropolis. His living experience in Shenyang as a teenager shaped his earliest impressions of a metropolitan area, and the process of urbanization in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s provided him with plenty of materials. Through an analysis of Abe's metropolitan novel Ruined Map, we can find how Abe profoundly depicted by fictional text a metropolis taking on post-modern features. Abe's mechanism of cognition constituted an attitude of introspection and...