| This dissertation explores relationships between literary representation and possibilities for political engagement during Japan's period of postwar, high-speed economic growth. I undertake close readings of three stories each by Goto Meisei and Kuroi Senji. In concentrating on writings by these members of the "Naiko no sedai," or "introspective generation," I focus on how representations of inhabited spaces (primarily those of the corporation, of the apartment complex, of suburbia) served in foregrounding the increasing alienation of everyday life as Japanese society rapidly "urbanized" in the 1960s. I regard the production of urban space and spatiality during this period as intrinsic to the interlocking machinations of state-sponsored monopoly capitalism and US strategic interests in East Asia. The intersection of such interests gave rise to a discursive formation known as seisansei, which I translate as "productivism," broadly characteristic of Japan's high-speed growth years. I view housing and its associated discourses as metonymical of productivism, which was itself inimical to historical consciousness and political agency.; Although Naiko no sedai writers were themselves castigated as "apolitical" for focusing on their autobiographical protagonists' putative "interiority," I regard their works as exemplifying what Michel Foucault termed "effective history." To read the works of Goto and Kuroi as effective history, I propound a method called "chronotopal criticism." This method renders serviceable to literary criticism Henri Lefebvre's concept of "spaces of representation," that facet of social space which is both the site of human agency and of "literature." Because Lefebvre himself has nothing to say about how literature comprises such a space, I turn to Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the literary chronotope. Regarded as both a determinant of genre and the basis for an embodied ethical position, the chronotope segues well with Lefebvre's conception of spaces of representation for demonstrating contiguity with other aspects of social space. Far from privileging the "material" aspects of social reality over the "discursive" as in doctrinaire Marxist approaches, such an approach enables critics to read literature as much more profoundly implicated in the production and reproduction of social space--and, therefore, in consciousness and in politics---than is often thought possible. |
