Abstract
A tension runs through Nathan Shockey’s well-researched book of essays on the topic of the medial transition to print culture; it is this: does the value of print material lie within its semantic content or within its market value? Although at several points the book refers to this as a dialectic as though each side of the tension were in equal balance, ultimately Shockey is more concerned with the latter notion of books and print as media objects in the world rather than as conveyors of meaning. This is evidenced by the preponderance of instances in which he highlights that reading does not matter and where writing (in the sense of the noun not the gerund) does or simply is matter.
Highlights
A tension runs through Nathan Shockey’s well-researched book of essays on the topic of the medial transition to print culture; it is this: does the value of print material lie within its semantic content or within its market
The book resembles other books in Japanese Studies—from Carol Gluck’s Japan’s Modern Myths (1987) and Karatani Kōjin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature to Victor Koschman’s Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (1996) and Sheldon Garon’s Molding Japanese Minds (1998)—all of which narrate the formation of the modern subject; Typographic Imagination does this, not through the content produced by government politicos, elite intellectuals, or literati intended to sway the masses, but through the medium of print itself
Unlike the wave of subject formation polemics from the long decade of the 1990s, The Typographic Imagination is grounded in particular objects of the material world (the “historically specific economic systems” of the “staple commodity” of print (6–7)) as the root of social, intellectual, and ideological transformation
Summary
A tension runs through Nathan Shockey’s well-researched book of essays on the topic of the medial transition to print culture; it is this: does the value of print material lie within its semantic content or within its market. Heitzman’s book achieves this goal through its readability, its research, its clarity, and its sensitivity to the things, themes, times, and trials of its subject, Yasuoka Shōtarō, who emerges as a living memory, and the creator of stories worth reading for their inherent value and for their own presentation of the living memories of Japan’s national life in this enduring, evolving postwar.
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