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Podcast: New Books in East Asian Studies
Episode: Michael K. Bourdaghs, "A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature" (Duke UP, 2021)
Description: Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature (Duke UP, 2021), Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume SÅseki (1867â1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For SÅseki, literature was a means for thinking throughâand beyondâprivate property. Bourdaghs puts SÅseki int...