How Many Shades of Brown? - Excremental Rhetoric in Modern Japanese Literature

Download or read book How Many Shades of Brown? - Excremental Rhetoric in Modern Japanese Literature written by Linda Galvane and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract This dissertation examines excrement as a literary and rhetorical device of imaginative discursive possibilities in modern Japanese literature. Given the ambivalent status of excrement as both stigmatized as well as a source of fascination, excremental rhetoric has the unique potential to illuminate the multiplicity of discourses -- aesthetics, body politics, ideology, and diachronic socio-cultural conditions -- that play out within Japanese literary production over the course of the twentieth century. Challenging the dominant tendency in both Western and Japanese scholarship to read the excremental through a given theoretical perspective, my work proposes a multifocal mode of reading that recognizes the plurality of excremental rhetoric by attending to excremental modalities, or the states in which excrement exists or is experienced and/or expressed. I show that reading for the modalities of the literary excremental within the text shifts emphasis from an "unveiling of truth" to an exploration of various sections of a pluri-discursive "sewage system" in modern Japanese literature, including those examined in these chapters related to toilets, gastrointestinal disorders, and copro-philia and -phagia. Chapter 1, "Toilet and Excrement Collectors: Tanizaki and Other Aesthetes" investigates Tanizaki's prolific literary excremental output against the backdrop of the aesthetic and scientific discourses of his time and in conversation with the literary production of others with comparable interests in the aesthetic excremental. Bringing to the fore the changing configurations of private and shared space, Tanizaki's toilet and excrement collection offers a theoretical model for how a variety of discourses related to modernization and modernity interconnect in the subterranean Japanese literary sewage system. Chapter 2, "Shit(ty) Wars or Battlefield Excrementalism: Hayashi Fumiko, Hino Ashihei, and Others from the Warfront" explores the aesthetics and ideology of what I designate as "battlefield excrementalism" or the excremental rhetoric employed in war narratives. The chapter revolves around Hayashi Fumiko's accounts from the Fifteen Years' War (1931-45). I examine Hayashi's works in conversation with other wartime narratives, most notably those by Hino Ashihei, and show how the constructedness of literary battlefield excrementalism engages with various types of colonizing and colonized bodies. Chapter 3, "Enema Stories and Queer Shit: From Kitan Club to Murakami Ryū" examines narratives dedicated to non-normative sexualities related to anal sexual practices and the predilection toward enema, in particular, in post-World War II and then Bubble/post-Bubble Japan. Enema in these two contexts demonstrates the waste potential of commodity and the commodity potential of waste, revealing itself as (literary) commodity.