Murakami, Haruki; Japanese Literature; Dostoevsky, Fyodor; Contemporary Literature

Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Schatz, David

Keywords

Murakami, Haruki, Japanese Literature, Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Contemporary Literature

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

This thesis establishes a short list of common tropes, concerns, and literary techniques common to Japanese literature from 1886 to the present through close readings of Mori Ogai's The Wild Goose and Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask. It also establishes a definition for one of these techniques, known as allusive re-creation. The thesis then explores the use of these elements, specifically self-conscious narration, invocation of foreign sources, unresolved dialectic, and allusive re-creation, in Haruki Murakami's novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It extrapolates this reading into a more general statement about Murakami's complete body of work, placing the novel in a literary context. Finally, the thesis makes more general arguments about the importance of Russian literature to Japanese literary tradition, specifically Murakami's work, and addresses a misreading of Murakami's use of Western sources present in much of the recent English criticism of his work.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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