Sublime Voices

by Bolton, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780674032781
• ISBN10: 0674032780
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-06-15
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Council on East Asian

Summary

Since the 1950s, Abe Kobo (19241993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of avant-garde literature. From his early forays into science fiction to his more mature psychological novels and films, and finally the complicated experimental works produced near the end of his career, Abe weaves together a range of "voices": the styles of science and the language of literary forms.In Abers"s oeuvre, this stylistic interplay links questions of language and subjectivity with issues of national identity and technological development in a way that ultimately aspires to become the catalyst for an artistic revolution. While recognizing the disruptions such a revolution might entail, Abers"s texts embrace these disjunctions as a way of realizing radical new possibilities beyond everyday experience and everyday values.By arguing that the crisis of identity and postwar anomie in Abers"s works is inseparable from the need to shy;marshal these different scientific and literary voices, Christopher Bolton explores how this reconciliation of ideas and dialects is for Abe part of the process whereby texts and individuals form themselves-a search for identity that must take place at the level of the self and society at large.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Note to the Reader

Introduction: Abe Kobo's Dictionary

Transforming Science: Metamorphosis in Abe's Life and Work

Abe's Essays and Some Historical Distinctions Between Literature and Science

Whirring Clicking Poetry: Inter Ice Age 4

The Dialogue of Styles, the Dance of Fiction, and The Face of Another

The Hope of Technology and the Technology of Hope in The Woman in the Dunes

The Parody, Perversity, and Cacophony of Secret Rendezvous

A Technology of Silence: The Ark Sakura and the Nuclear Threat

Reference Matter

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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