Yokomitsu Riichi In The Field Of Modernity

This paper discusses the modernity issue in the specific literary text of Yokomitsu Riichi(1898-1947),from which the complex transition of modern society is comprehended.The research method refers to Anthony Giddens,the British sociologist in the 20th century,whose framework of modernity shows as the following institutional dimensions:first,economic globalization of capitalism,second,international division of labor,third,national system,and fourth,global military order.Meanwhile,the sociologist Talcott Parsons,whose theory of functional subsystem of the social system precisely named universalism and particularism value system,has also become the reference.Yokomitsu Riichi was regarded as a conservative civilian,in his influentially living day,which laid between the 1920s and the 1940s,East Asia had sprung up her modernity.It was also the time that history made her unique transformation.In other words,Yokomitsu Riichi's writing,as well as his experience,was an indivisible part of the sophisticated social transition,which involved the changes of various aspects.1920s-1940s in East Asian political history,was the progressing,revolutionary,martial,violent decades.And the 1930s,when the Japanese political circle made its considerable turn to militarism,and shew the ambition of invading the mainland,particularly,was the time that Yokomitsu Riichi made himself established in the literary circle,where he witnessed the ups and downs of monopoly capitalism and worldly living.Yokomitsu Riichi has become the most representative intellectual in the Japanese literary circle of the transitional period,in which his work Shanghai,The Machine,The Garden of Sleep were written.And these work have been appreciated by today's scholar,at home and abroad,as the unexceptionably valuable text to analyze Japanese national community,ideas and culture,or political evolution in those days.Accordingly,the thesis of this paper has been supposed,that Yokomitsu Riichi 's writing had embodied the crushing defeat of the fierce fight between the western universalist value and the particularist local politics.This fight,namely,literature,and so called "motioned politics",expressed the personality and psychology dilemma during the changing age.Further,on the one hand,this paper sets out from the unsettled issue in the study of Yokomitsu Riichi,that the rise of East Asian modernity had encountered globalization in the first half of the 20th century,when Yokomitsu Riichi's past time world was reflecting the multi-dimensional stress of modernity.And in the trace to the source of the social transformation,it is possible to find that to what extent did the transformation happen,and why its limit could hardly be broken through.on the other hand,this paper is seeking to find the possibility that how the western universalist modernity and the particularist locality could join together.Jurgen Habermas said,"Enlightenment is an unfinished project",similarly,East Asian modernity is not only of the geographical concept,but also of the historical and cultural tradition.For the sake of public ethic,which to conquer the consequences of modernity,the means of literature is used to explore the way to find the equal intersubjectivity.Yet the history and the present has been tortured a lot,the individual should return to "freeman union" of East Asian nation.That is,through a new set of regional principle,the universalist civilization and particularist culture could be arranged appropriately and comprehended truly.