Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of
ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores
how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Soseki
(1867-1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist,
exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new
system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance,
thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth
while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For
Soseki, literature was a means for thinking through-and
beyond-private property. Bourdaghs puts Soseki into dialogue with
thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno
Rentaro, author of Japan's first copyright law) and discusses how
his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kojin and Franco
Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Soseki both appropriated and rejected
concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized
literature as a critical response to the emergence of global
capitalism.
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