The decay of the real: Oe Kenzaburo and the reinvention of literary heterodoxy

This project has two intertwined objects of inquiry. The first object is to reconstruct the discourse genre called junbungaku/pure literature. This vexed category has intermittently but relentlessly dominated both critical thinking and publishing practices in Japanese literature from the mid-Meiji era (1890's) to recent times when the category has decayed, if not been dismissed. Initially, the discourse genre appeared orthodox and centripetal, oscillating around powers that sought to establish a new literature in accordance with the culture of Japan as modern nation-state. Yet, as the title suggests, from the start debates about pure literature have been saturated by heterogeneous valences. This is due, in part, to the continuing practice of translating and transmitting foreign texts and ideas into both the critical arena and publishing industry. Thus the notion of pure literature is crosscut by reified but significant aesthetic polemics and an inevitable capitalist logic of segmentation, producing many a canon built only to be later demolished.;The second object is to investigate the centrifugal impact on this discourse genre by author/theorist, Oe Kenzaburo. The explicit goal is to debunk the public myth that Oe is the last living practitioner of pure literature. Rather, in the course of contextualizing and interpreting the first half of his oeuvre, we shall demonstrate the innovation required to develop a heterolingual address. This form of address privileges marginalized voices, perspectives, and ideas that might otherwise be ignored amidst a society regimented by the global imperatives of high growth economics and banal consumerism. Oe's utopian/dystopian explorations of the possibilities for solidarity, subjectivity, and sustainable progress represent one of the finest critical voices of both the postwar and the contemporary era. Such work embodies but one of the tasks of both literature and critical inquiry within Japan. The conclusion, then, argues that such work is still incomplete, and so the significant role of the literary imagination and social critique remains salient for both Oe's future readers and for the place of the next Japan.