Natsume And Modern Japan's Cultural Identity Construction

In the early years of Meiji, Japan, a new nation-state, involved itself in its modern development. Faced with the Western invasion and the decline of China, its cultural mother country, the thinkers in the ideological circles offered varied answers to the cultural identity of Japan, while the government finally chose a wrong way of obtaining hegemony in East Asia via waging aggressive wars. People have to, therefore, review their symbolic thinking mode imposed upon the culture identity of the country. Taking this into consideration, the present thesis illustrates the Japanese writer and theorist Natume Souseki's cultural value from the perspective of the constitution of Japanese cultural identity in the modern times. The thesis first of all points out that in order to realize an "Imagined Communities", the modern Japanese government, through the "accordance of spoken and written language", carried out a phonocentric movement coinciding with those of the nationalist scholars in the 18th century. Modern Japanese literature formed thereby which shared the original identity as well as mutual complement with the country. In this context, Natumei tried hard to explore consistently the nature of "refinement (literature in its broad concept)" by creating his works with a metaphorical insight, thus using the word "refinement", an answer with humanistic spirit, to identify the Japanese culture of the modern times.The thesis is composed of six chapters. The first chapter is introductory part; the last chapter is the summary; and the other four chapters are elaboration on certain cases.The first chapter discusses the cultural identity, the exploration of Japanese cultural identity and the formation of modern Japanese literature. Chapter Two explains Natume's view on "refinement" in his book Elaboration on Literature. This chapter also shows his literary and cultural mode on a universal basis, which is proposed via the formula "F+f'. Firstly, the formula explores a concept of "field" which is based on the relations among the author, audience and context connected by means of symbols. Secondly, the concept of "field" on the linguistic level represents the foundation of his metaphoric language that evokes the emotion. Thirdly, the metaphoric language means the counteraction of moralism. Chapter Three organizes Natumei's idea of "sketch articles", and explains his pursuit of "refinement" in terms of stylistics during the earlier period of his career. The forth chapter shows that Natumei used present tense in his work when "the neutral statement mode" became the mainstream in the literary circles. His works, therefore, achieved "refinement" in narrative study due to his persistence in adopting a pre-modern narrative style that highlighted the narrator. Chapter Five tells that the main source of Natumei's "refinement" idea is Chinese literature that promotes the realization of his idea by analyzing the structuring of his mind and the connotation of "adopting universality while abandoning selfishness" proposed in his old age. However, his incompleteness of "refinement" is also pointed out in this chapter through analyzing his novels such as Travel Notes in China and Korea, etc. On the basis of the above-mentioned four chapters, the last chapter elaborates on the relationship between Natumei's "refinement" and metaphor, the development of "refinement" in modern Japanese ideology and its relationship with Japanese modernity. By stating that "refinement" is an aesthetic metaphor, the counteraction of aesthetic modernity to social modernity is unfolded.