2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Machado de Assis and Soseki Natsume-Affinities between the Two Contemporary Writers of the Antipodes-
| Project/Area Number |
15520158
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
ヨーロッパ語系文学
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| Research Institution | Tokyo University of Foreign Studies |
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Principal Investigator |
TAKEDA Chika Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Faculty of Foreign Studies, Associate professor, 外国語学部, 助教授 (20345317)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
SHIBATA Shoji Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Faculty of Foreign Studies, Professor, 外国語学部, 教授 (80206135)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2003 – 2006
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| Keywords | Brazilian Literature / Japanese Modern Literature / Machado de Assis / Soseki NATSUME / Comparative Literature |
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| Research Abstract |
Machado de Assis (1839-1908), considered as one of the greatest Brazilian writers, is almost contemporary with Soseki Natsume (1867-1916). Despite the absence of any active cultural exchange between Brazil and Japan at that time, some affinities can be observed in their works. This is a study of comparative literature with a view to bringing out the reasons behind these similarities observed between the works of these writers, which obviously could not be attributed to inter-textuality.
What we have understood through this research is that it is quite possible that both Machado and Soseki adopted the same literary method, that is, the use of allegory, to demonstrate their criticisms against their respective countries: Brazil as a Modern Nation for Machado, and Modern Japan of the Meiji Era for Soseki. Curiously their works have a lot in common, and the similarities can be attributed to the era and the international and geopolitical circumstances in which the two nations were situated in that period. Both nations opened their doors to the West after a long isolation in the nineteenth century in response to the external pressures sent from the Occident, and were suddenly set in the international community already established according to the European standards and values, and were driven to dedicate themselves desperately to obtain progress and to reborn as a modern nation.
Machado and Soseki lived through that tempestuous period and described their experiences in each works. It can be said that their literature are common in the sense that they originate in the non-occidental regions located in the 'periphery' of the world, where the society and the people were forced to confront the waves of modernization coming from the European nations. The affinities that lay between the novels of the two writers are, then, natural and inevitable consequences.
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