American Renaissance in the Age of Theory: A Far East Version / アメリカン・ルネッサンスと批評理論：極東版

Abstract

This article traces the way postwar Japanese scholars primarily accepted the concept of American Renaissance in the New Critical milieu (the 1950s-70s) and then radically reinterpreted it in the age of postmodernism (the 1980s-90s), ending up with the rising generation in the post-Cold War and transnational climate of the 21st century. The author illustrated the points with numerous works from the 1970s through the 2010s, with special emphasis upon Professor Toshio Yagi of Seijo University and Professor Fumio Ano of Tohoku University, a couple of academic giants in this field. On one hand, Yagi's epoch-making essay "Moby-Dick as Mosaic" (originally written in 1983 and translated into English by Yagi himself in 1993) anatomized Melville's proto-postmodern blueprint of writing the mega-novel as a deconstructive mosaic. On the other hand, Ano, sharing the metaphor of mosaic with Yagi, attempted to represent the very Hawthornesque history as mosaic. His 1985 essay "Hawthorne and Poison" (originally written in 1985 and translated into English by Ano himself in 2007) critically expanded Dr. Jemshed A. Khan's intriguing perspective upon Hawthorne, and creatively re-read the short story "Rappaccini's Daughter." It is their trans-Pacific interactions with North American specialists that helped make today's Japanese scholarship of American literature international.