The critique of the virtual shifting discrusive space in Japanese literature 1960s--1980s

This dissertation explores the emerging sense of "the virtual" in literature, a new sense of reality that sprang up from unprecedented experiences in Japan: the loss of World War Two in 1945 and the high economic development during the 1960s. Though its roots were planted more than a decade earlier, this virtual sense of reality flourished in Japanese literature from around 1960. While Japan started enjoying material affluence in the late 1960s, the anti-establishment socialist ideals still remained strong among the intellectuals. There was a dissociation between the nation's course and intellectual ideals that resulted in producing a detached sense of subjectivity, which coincided with the increasing social mobility that stemmed from the economic growth. The economic growth reduced the boundaries between locals and nation-states, and this increasingly flattening world demanded a new sense of subject-reality, the virtual.;As military defeat and the advance of capitalism leveled out fundamental differences in understanding history and local values, literary writers such as Yoshimoto Takaaki and Oe Kenzaburo tried to sublimate this changing world-view into artistic production. Old myth and new rationale are intermingled to create a literary sensation.;A sense of the split in subjectivity became a norm during the 1970s. Shoji Kaoru incorporated the language of mass media in his works to show that atomized (detached and fragmented) consumers are subject to the mass media, which would alleviate the wounds of the split in historicity and literary subjectivity. Murakami Haruki bluntly declared that uniqueness in locality and history in Japan is long gone and it no longer constitutes a literary theme. Americanization is a matter of fact in life and people have to live with it. Murakami's pragmatic acceptance of the reality, however, can endanger the sense of the virtual.;The virtual in literature always accompanies a site of critique, an entity to question the ground of our understanding of history and of our customary appreciation of narrative-stories. In conclusion, this dissertation introduces Nakagami Kenji's attempt to reinvent a critical tension in the virtual space, the space between literary and filmic (media) expressions.