2022-23 Academic Catalog

This course offers an introduction to modern theories of art, with an emphasis on the origin of modern Japanese literature (1868-1945) and its newly cultivated aesthetic sensibilities. What are the defining characteristics of literature and what are its values in society? How is our aesthetic taste for beauty determined? The course surveys the field of modern Japanese literature, exploring the newly instituted notion of “literature” and the lofty role its pursuit of “beauty” played, as writers insisted, in enlightening the modern denizens living in the age of uncertainty. Topics of inquiry include how the shift in aesthetic taste for beauty correlated with the change in human relation to the natural world, and what moral implication it entailed. We explore answers to these questions by close-reading various cultural texts. Other readings will range historically and cross-culturally from premodern indigenous discourse on beauty to the nineteenth century Western aesthetic.