UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the transformation of lyric thinking in Japanese literati (bunjin) culture from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. I examine four poet-painters associated with the Japanese literati tradition in the Edo (1603-1867) and Meiji (1867-1912) periods: Yosa Buson (1716-83), Ema Saikō (1787-1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) and Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916). Each artist fashions a lyric subjectivity constituted by the kinds of blending found in literati painting and poetry. I argue that each artist’s thoughts and feelings emerge in the tensions generated in the process of blending forms, genres, and the ideas (aesthetic, philosophical, social, cultural, and historical) that they carry with them. As poet-painters, Buson, Saikō, Shiki, and Sōseki blended these constitutive elements of literature like strokes of paint on a canvas. Through examinations of blending, I show the movement of thought and feeling, the dynamism of lyric thinking, in poetic form.

Through such blending each artist evoked a heightened consciousness of the senses—sight, sound, smell, and touch. I examine how each artist thinks through sensual embodiment in poetic form, and show how the boundaries of lyric thinking expand by the Meiji period as traditional genres of poetry begin to overlap and blend with modern prose. Between the late eighteenth century and the Meiji period, new genres of writing emerge, yielding more possibilities for sensual embodiment in poetic form. Traditional genres such as haikai and kanshi also endure as antiquated and autonomous forms, and in vernacular prose as compounded forms that place ideas of the past and the present in dialectical motion. This dialectical motion appears in modern prose as constitutive elements of lyric thinking, and as obstructions to the linear movement of thought in narrative prose.

The chapters are organized chronologically. In Chapter 1, I show how lyric thinking manifests as tensions in the perception of time and space in Buson’s haikai. In Chapter 2, I examine Saikō’s kanshi, and show how her lyric thinking manifests in a dialectical and ironic relationship with genre. In Chapter 3, I show how Shiki’s lyric thinking manifests as contradictions of thought in his artistic practice called shasei, or “representing life.” In Chapter 4, I examine lyric thinking in Sōseki’s modern prose. I show how his lyrical novel Kusamakura and prose-poem Omoidasu koto nado give form to grief through contradiction and irony.

The dissertation shows what the lyric writings of Buson, Saikō, Shiki, and Sōseki can tell us about lyric thinking, subjectivity, and the philosophy of poetic form.