Trespasses: Selected Writings

Trespasses presents key writings of the Tokyo-born literary scholar Masao Miyoshi, one of the most important postwar intellectuals to link culture with politics and a remarkable critical voice within the academy. For more than four decades, Miyoshi worked outside the mainstream, trespassing into new fields, making previously unseen connections, and upending naive assumptions. With an impeccable sense of when a topic or discussion had lost its critical momentum, he moved on to the next question, and then the next after that, taking on matters of literary form, cross-cultural relations, globalization, art and architecture, the corporatization of the university, and the threat of ecological disaster. Trespasses reveals the tremendous range of Miyoshi’s thought and interests, shows how his thinking transformed over time, and highlights his recurring concerns. This volume brings together eleven selections of Miyoshi’s previously published writing, a major new essay, a critical introduction to his life and work, and an interview in which Miyoshi reflects on the trajectory of his thought and the institutional history of modern Japan studies. In the new essay, “Literary Elaborations,” he provides a masterful overview of the nature of the contemporary university, closing with a call for a global environmental protection studies that would radically reconfigure academic disciplines and merge the hard sciences with the humanities and the social sciences. In the other, chronologically arranged selections, Miyoshi addresses cross-culture relations between Japan and the United States, English literary studies in Japan, and Japan studies in the U.S., as well as the organization of urban space and the integrity of art and architecture in aggressively marketed-oriented environments. Trespasses is an invaluable introduction to the work of a fearless cultural critic.

Table of Contents:
Foreword / Fredric Jameson xi Introduction. Trespasser: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Masao Miyoshi / Eric Cazdyn xv Literary Elaborations 1 First-Person Pronouns in Japanese Diaries (1979) 49 The Tale of Genji: Translation as Interpretation (1979) 77 Who Decides, and Who Speaks? Shutaisei and the West in Postwar Japan (1991) 83 The Invention of English Literature in Japan (1993) 111 A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State (1993) 127 Outside Architecture (1996) 151 "Bunburying" in the Japan Field: A Reply to Jeff Humphries (1997) 159 Art without Money: documenta X (1998) 175 Japan Is Not Interesting (1999) 189 Ivory Tower in Escrow: Ex Uno Plures (2000) 205 Turn to the Planet: Literature and Diversity, Ecology and Totality (2001) 243 A Conversation with Masao Miyoshi (2000) 263 Notes 285 Selected Works by Masao Miyoshi 331 Index 333