Humanity has always had the necessity of leaving a record from its pass on

Earth building in this way history and culture. It would be impossible to think
civilization without a record. As to say history could be one possible method in which
lay this record in the sense of gather events chronologically and in a written manner,
however, also this is literature area. If we consider history as an objective record, culture
could be cause and consequence of history with the contributions brought by folks. But
on the other hand objectivity is not easy to reach due to perception and also who bears
the power. Rarely there could be an accurate version of the events due to the differences
of trend of thoughts and from this point it splits political, philosophic, economic and
religious ideas just to mention four pillars for further development of ideologies. We
should not forget the importance of natural borders, which are the first barriers in the
development of cultures, and hand in hand the races divided in many ethnic groups.
These last facts produce a strong incidence in languages and dialects. Supposing we
have an objective history there is also the attitude upheld by the reader. Literature is the
free opinion of history connected with art. Literature is the global medium to express
oppression, freedom, love, spirituality, hatred, religion, and traditions, what can be said
and what can also be suggested through a metaphor. Literature is communication among
human beings who dream and expect similar things, no racial differences, a better world
and so on. The world is the big library of Universe and translation tear down any border
unifying the human essence. There exists a great probability to grasp all the desires of
humanity only by reading. As to say, the perfect world, as many authors have done with
their utopias, and the failure of the perfect world through the dystopias, the conflict of
immigrants, discrimination by race and gender, East and West, powerful and the have-
nots, wealth and poverty. The impact done by a good piece of writing is powerful than
images, the writing stays in our mind because words have a kind of music while the
images could fade through time or one second missed on the screen can change the
story while a good writer traps us by the skilful use of the language. Important to
mention, about literature, is the fact that we need emotion and three people to have
literature, the writer, the character and the reader. Soseki Natsumei, in his essay
“Foundations” he wrote that a man can bear his isolation reading good literature
transforming the isolation in community. This could be the big difference between
history and literature. Movies are an excellent tool also to tell the stories of famous
books, however, the book will last longer, only we have to think in Homerii, the great
masterpiece- Odyssey- taken later by James Joyceiii. The writer spent the same journey
that Ulysses had but changing Greece for Dublin holding the hand of Leopold Bloom iv
and sharing with the reader the human doubts of daily life and the profound theme of
identity that any man stand within himself.
The marvellous world of literature is that while we are reading we are immersed
in a new experience, we get deeply involved with the topic, and the feelings of the
characters , so we can start absorbing different cultures by knowing the simple facts of
daily nature in an alien culture, is the first step to get rid of prejudices, to understand
that we are sharing a Planet and not a piece of land with limits -the limits are only build
by prejudiced minds- knowledge and tolerance are what magnifies mankind.
Notwithstanding we can see important realities through different styles of
literature as to say in science fiction (SF or sci-fiv), the purpose aims to related topics of
science and technology and the human presence, to infer how could be a new planet
dwelt by strange creatures. Not only does SF apply to this lineal reading but also can
bear a metaphor as it were a Utopia or dystopia. Many writers put forward a criticism to
society while they present some SF or fiction book. It is valuable to differentiate sci-fi
from fantasy. Although sci –fi is fantasy there are elements which give to the style a
distinguish mark and is the use of science as an element of the plot. However, it does
not matter if what is written about science is purely imaginative. The purpose of this
style is to make literature from ideas. The characters not necessarily have to be aliens,
there could be humans after an atomic war, and suffer from the sides effects of
radiation, humans genetically manipulated, time travels, or robots.
This brief view leads us to the definition of literature. The traditional dictionary
definition given by Dictionary.com:” writings in which expression and form, in
connection with ideas of permanent and universal interest are characteristic or
essential features, as poetry, novels, history, biography and essays”. In other words
West considers- through Latin works- the fact that literature is any written collection –
mainly prose- fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. At the very beginning was oral
and from that period the gender was epic, we can gather myths, ballads and folktales All
these elements are the basis for culture; from here on born all possible artistic
movements. I will develop through this paper the one that sans from the end of
nineteenth century up to nowadays. Modernismvi, symbolismvii, structuralismviii,
deconstrutivismix and postmodernismx just to name some of them,
In brief we can say that the two main periods of the twentieth
century are divided in two, one period span from 1900 to 1940,
known as Modernist Literature; while the second period elapsed
from 1945 to 1980. The War World II was taken as a rule of thumb in
this division. Popular literature developed its own genres as science
fiction and fantasy whereas the unconventional literature developed
its own environment. This last type is the one I will devote the
following courses .Just to confirm that literature is an art in itself, it is also the
reflected in the action of a period of human evolution; I will draw a parallel between
modern art and modern literature. This last concept will show us the strong connection
that every human movement has in the wholeness of world. Humankind has woven a
big huge net and we can move freely inside or be trapped by ourselves. The secret is
how, when and why we do everything. In this case a painting is the same concept as a
book , there is a strong elaboration, the painting is a piece of thought and feeling lying
on a canvas, while the book is the same collection of thoughts but on shits of paper or
digitally saved. Everything has to do with something else. It is a question of action-
reaction but the net woven by these effects feel and react at any moment creating a
dynamic system. With this idea in mind we have to think that a book can change
opinions, create new thoughts that will affect the future evolution of society. Can we
imagine that a painting has to do with a piece of writing? Just to see one example of this
tight connection we have to picture in mind the “Guernicaxi” painted by Picassoxii in
Spain as a memento for the tough moment that the inhabitants of that country were
crossing due to de Civil Warxiii. Maybe I will choose William Faulknerxiv in the side of
the writers -the election is due to the fact that Picasso was involved in the moment that
Spain was living, and Faulkner mentioned his Mississippi, so that identity is important-
to make the parallel. Also the movement that was breaking in is important- cubismxv
was arousing the fact that the concept in drawing and writing was the same, just
disjoined parts that altogether make wholeness. On the other hand the identity is very
important; in spite of being a marked feature we can recognise the universality of
mankind in both. Seeing carefully the big mural we can infer pain, oppression,
rebellion, unhappiness, death and fear and who held the Spain´s power at that moment.
Each fragment of the painting has a meaning the discourse we seize is tremendous -
each of those fragments yelled the reality of that moment and the everlasting depth of
feelings that arouse to any viewer start producing stream of consciousness; here the
connection between writing and literature. It is possible, in the book and in the paint to
follow the thought of the author .This is the importance of the net; isolation is a barren
place where nothing can grow. All the same matter can be read in “The Fury and the
Sound”xvi. In both pieces we find love, death, time and innocence. We can feel both
message and understand that are universal matters. Here we are talking about common
feelings in front of art; notwithstanding there is another side to check, the individualism
of the artist. Although apparent selfishness; literature goes on being Universal. From
Spender´sxvii point of view poets and novelists tried to construct their own point of view
since the cut off from orthodoxy. However, they drawn to myth the use of it result in an
unorthodox way. Again is necessary to mention Joyce who using myth creates his own
mythology. On the other hand Yeastsxviii in his work “A Visions”xix the way path which
gives framework to this writing is through occultism and astrology; this feature will be
repeated later in his poetry. Individualist vision in writers was due to rejection of society
or by society, both leading to the same result and the struggle to set up the new values.
Baudelairexx, in his Journal has written about the separation of the individualist values
from the materialistic one in modern society. From a different standpoint as to
demonstrate again that the man speaks through feelings and it does not matter if man is
settle in West or in East we can see again Soski Natsumexxi position. In his essay
“Foundations” he states the strong isolation suffered by man and this ailment can have
temporary cure – or at least relief-through literature. This state of disunity in search of
unity can weld in community through literature. There are some writer who encrypt they
writing, as there exist an anecdote about Joyce and a reader , who claimed that for
understand Finnegans Wakexxii he needed a life time , Joyce´s reply was , “ That is the
least I expected of my readers “.

Now is important the determination of de historical context just to see what

causes each writing movement. It is valuable analyse by what has been impressed
humankind mind to spawn a reaction that is possible to follow through the books that
were written in that period .The events where as to mention only some, the end of the
century, the hope and expectation for the next century, communications, both Wars, the
A-Bomb, new technology, better life, medical improvements, all these facts made that
the writers needed to capture and tell in the infinite and universal language of literature.
It could be added some other topics that have enlarge the list and are also relevant; some
politic regime, religious disagreement, as to say celibacy or when religion is prohibited
(The Power and the Glory- Silence), discrimination, atrocities of the different wars
(Black Rain) , colonialism and so on a large list of themes that arouses in literature.
Some novels are historic and some other trace the event but using characters with
different names or changing the setting and also changing the time as something
happened in future and could be considered Fantasy or Science Fiction (SF). It is here
where the reader has to have the capacity and knowledge to read between lines the real
intention of the writer. Now analysing the end of the century we will get important
information to settle the pillars of future literature movement. As French was the
universal language especially diplomatic and well educated people, and also because
grew in Paris and Belgium, the movement was called Fin de Sièclexxiii. The expression
Fin de Siècle contained the idea of the end of a period and the hope born by the future.
This dualist feeling was due to the fact that a very special period was going on and the
excitement of the next was also burning, this feeling invaded Europe. Meanwhile, in
Russia this period was mostly named as Silver Age.
However, it does not be forgotten that also it was period of decline and
degeneration. The expression in itself brings a mood of ominous mixture of opulence
and the radical unavoidable end. This end and a new start hatched the new outlook,
which had its great representation through Stéphane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine,
and Charles Baudelaire. While Joris Karl Huysmanxxiv´s novel “Against
Naturexxv” was imitated by Oscar Wildexxvi in some passages of “The
Picture of Dorian Grayxxvii” .Basically the movement centred in Paris, nonetheless
there were symbolistxxviii movements in Poland, America, Germany, Belgium, Greece,
Italy and Russia. Each of these countries put a different stress on the matter that the
artist focused on. As to say Belgium was most involved with the working class issues,
while Russia was with spiritual and national concerns. The British Aestheticismxxix was a
form of symbolism. The main characteristic of the new perspective was the eagerness of
transmit to the viewer, listener or reader new sensations as could be the repetition of
sounds, decorative patterns in painting, special arrangements of words in a piece of
writing these are vehicles for transcending the material or empirical world. These
elements give ground to emergence of modernist abstraction in art and literature.
Symbolism can be seen from another point of view, not a reaction but the necessity of
man to do something in order to change the direction of the world. The new way of
explaining things in a very scientific way, capitalism and comfort, Darwinism xxx and
positivismxxxi brought those artists to call attention to the spiritual world and this trend
was put forward.
In Britain the movement was based on the idea that beauty has to exist for its
own sake. They do not apply to the idea to address audience with contemporary
questions, it was a way to criticise the bourgeois society and also referred to the
morality cradled by comfort during the nineteenth- century in Britain. William Blake xxxii
was influenced by the French Baudelaire and other symbolist from France. To
understand the symbols one way is to check frequency, the way in which the author
presents them, how the reader is stricken by this element. The reader must trust intuition
probably the author had the same intention in meaning as the one grasped by the reader,
as literature is a question of human matters the symbols are universal in their meanings
there could be slight differences maybe between West and East.
Related to East, and in order to have a mere view on how
things evolved on the other half of the world these few facts: the
history of literature in the Modern period in Europe begins with the
Age of Enlightenmentxxxiii and the conclusion of the Baroquexxxiv
period in the 18th century, succeeding the Renaissance and Early
Modern periods. In the classical literary cultures outside of Europe,
the Modern period begins later, in Ottoman Turkeyxxxv with the
Tanzimatxxxvi reforms (1820s), in Qajar Persiaxxxvii under Nasser al-
DinShahxxxviii (1830s), in India with the end of the Mughal eraxxxix and
the establishment of the British Rajxl (1850s), in Japan with the Meiji
restorationxli (1860s), in China with the New Culture Movement xlii
(1910s).To be more precise in the reference to East, I will mention Japan in the same
period. They were shifting from the neo-romanticism xliiito the anti-naturalismxliv. The
Meiji era lasted 45 years, which were the years reigned by Meiji Emperor, translated to
Gregorian calendar we are talking exactly from 23 October 1868 to 30 July 1912. This
was the moment when Japan started its modernization; this means that culture focused
on West, in all the senses, as to summarize it could be said a “Westernization”. The man
who was a pioneer in the change was Soseki Natsumexlv. A writer who attended the
Imperial University of Tokyo and after spent two years in England with an scholarship
given by the Emperor in order to grasp West from the very source. At his return he
became professor of English literature, but his real vocation was literature. However,
other moves were done to inculcate the European scientific method and rationalism xlvi
through educational reform. Shimazaki Tosonxlvii adopted Naturalism and the scientific
novel from France as a model suitable for the new Japan. The first decades of twentieth
century Naturalismxlviii was present. Although, some other writers resisted that change,
they have something different in mind; among these writers we find Mori Ogai and
Soseki. In Soseki´s case he found that first of all the first year spent in London was not
happy at all, he questioned himself about this and he realised that the anxiety to grasp
west was not the way; it had to have a process. He stated that the anxiety on the
“Westernization” built an exaggerated admiration to Naturalism. In his essay “The
Philosophical Foundations of Literature”, he refers to Maupassantxlix and Zolal as well as
to Ibsenli to suggest “the aesthetic poverty of a realistic depiction of the sordid human,
with no care for the power of beauty, heroic determination or even attention to
technique”. On the other hand it is impossible to change culture without understanding
first where does this change aim. The duality/binarity bore by Soseki throughout his
work was between annoyance and outstandingness. The self-reference is at the core of
his understanding. His timeless style surprised Meiji ´s lecture audience as today does
with his readers. For West artists and to East´s artists, the worries were the same the
slight difference due to different backgrounds. However, this won´t avoid them to
happen at the antipodes. Naoya Shigalii and others founded a magazine with the only
purpose to put forward Humanismliii. During 1920´s and 1930´s there became a
proletarian movement and literature was in charge to show the harsh reality lived by the
workers, women, peasant and downtrodden members of that society and how they
fought for a change. Representative writers of that period are Takiji Kobayashiliv,
Denji Kuroshimalv, Yuriko Miyamotolvi, and Ineko Satalvii.

Just ending the century we have the modernist movement on stage. The artists
that were enrolled in this new wave had even written a manifesto – “First German
Dadalviii Manifesto” Richard Huelsenbecklix (1918)-where he stated the fact that artists
are creatures of their epoch. Also through art will be reflected the deepest problems of
daily life, the struggle for individuality and the overwhelming strive that man has in
face of social, cultural and historical heritage. One thing that worries the modernist
group was radical individuality and this element can be traced in America (end of
nineteenth- century). The matter arouses from Mexican Warlx, Thoreau´slxi essay “Civil
Disobediencelxii” and the movement led by Benjamin Tuckerlxiii and the sisters Heywood,
Angela and Ezralxiv (the last was already a veteran social reformer). First Ezra was
abolitionist but then she turned towards labour. The main engines for the group were:
free love, self decision about marriage, women equality and especial attention to the
labour reform. The issue “The Word” was subtitled “A Monthly Journal of Reform”. By
the time Tucker decided that to speak about real liberty, economy was the first step, so
he drifted apart from the sisters. These events affected modern literature and here is
made a re-contextualization of individuals; in the framework of social heritage and
expressed through the “mythic method”. This method is applied to make a parallel
between antiquity and contemporaneity. (The clear example could be find in Ulysses by
James Joyce - where an antique myth – as is Ulysses- who is brought to present , and
shows the struggle lived by the hero which is put on stage in the flesh of Leopold
Bloom). Writers of this period are: Knut Hamsunlxv whose novel- Hungerlxvi- is
considered the first in this style; Virginia Woolflxvii, Ernest Hemingwaylxviii, T.S. Elliotlxix,
Gertrude Steinlxx, James Joycelxxi, Ezra Poundslxxii, William Faulknerlxxiii, Frank Kafkalxxiv,
Luigi Pirandellolxxv, Samuel Beckettlxxvi, Marcel Proustlxxvii, Boris Pasternaklxxviii, Djuna
Barneslxxix, D.H. Lawrencelxxx, Josef Conradlxxxi. Some elements of this style are: free
indirect speechlxxxii, stream of consciousnesslxxxiii, juxtaposition of characterslxxxiv, wide
use of classical allusionslxxxv, figure of speechlxxxvi, satirelxxxvii, ironylxxxviii,
psychoanalysislxxxix, symbolic representationxc, multiple narrative points of viewxci. While
the themes could turn around human behaviour in front of social reality ,with or without
any chance of change, the huge damage done by the wars, the feeling of no –belonging
(just for social, religious or nationality reasons), rejection of history and outdated
system, spiritual loneliness and alienation ,both, leading to breakdown. Parallel with
this style in Japan, it is possible to mention Kobo Abexcii whose writing was very alike
Beckettxciii´s in style. Modern Japanese writers use themes such as inner life of the
subject and the narrator ´s consciousness. In Japanese fiction the plot and action take a
secondary role in front of emotional topics, keeping the general turned of the old themes
some authors turned to the past. The authors like to go round Buddhist attitudes, the
importance of self-knowledge, and the distressing fact of the ephemeral of material
society this last bore as a criticism. Another relevant theme is the position of Japanese
women and people lost in the complexity urban life which leads to isolation in the
multitude. In my opinion this can be summarize as Japanese existentialism.

The twentieth century was prolific in different tendencies of thought this fact
was reflected directly into the world of words (literature ) , into the world of images,
(paintings and sculptures) and sounds (music), so we can see that everything is
connected, all the world was trying a new language. During this period we see that the
arousal of existentialismxciv and deconstructivismxcv. However to reach this point it was
necessary a first step, structuralism. What structuralism does is to state the binary
oppositions hot/cold, being/nothingness. This same thought is applied in China as
Ying/Yang. Structuralism concerns, also, to semiotic, the meaning of signs and in some
way we are again connected with the idea that generated symbolist movement .It is an
idea in evolution. Genettexcvi says that this line of thought is a study for cultural
construction or identification of meaning according to the background of the culture.
Akin to this thought we have that literature has increased the cultural meanings. Here
literature is a speech which has its protocols for meaning, uses of language, rhetoricxcvii
subject area and so forth. This new way of thinking leads us to survey what does
actually represent reality in art. This step allows the advent of existentialism.
The position maintained by existentialism is that any individual is what he/she
decides to be. The question of freedom is crucial. I daresay is based on free will,
notwithstanding related to free will and freedom is controversial to lay an opinion
because the subtle differences that philosophers find between both -in which are also
involved questions of belief- is difficult to analyse and it is not the purpose now. The
most relevant existentialist and representative of this philosophy is Jean Paul Sartrexcviii.
The major document delivered by him was “Being and Nothingnessxcix”. He speaks
about the human reality exists in two ways, one in-itself and the other one for-itself, that
is consciousness. For Sartre to be aware of reality caused a kind of nausea that was the
consequence of the absurdity of the same recognition of existence. This last word was
very important as a feature left to and for writers of that time. The idea that ruled this
movement was in few words that existence gives as the chance to choose so we have to
choose. A thinker admired by Sartre was Albert Camus that proclaimed that the
confrontation of he world against the strong and irrational desire to make sense in our
condition of human beings produce absurdity. As a consequence of this action arouses
three consequences: revolt, passion and freedom. By these references we can grasp the
vast connotations given from this thought to literature at that moment. The effects were
all felt in the different branches of art, and today we are enjoying this freedom at the
moment to choose a movement that identifies the new man born from this open-minded
twentieth century. In the case of French literary existentialism Camus stated that the
philosopher is a creator who has the characters, the symbol and the secret action, while
Sartre said that fictional technique relates the writer to metaphysicc. He also considered
that since the philosopher knows how the ideas affect life, the philosopher must
embrace human condition totally. Sartre backed the idea that a novelist should be
engaged with the historical moment and grasps the moral dimension. When the writer is
successful the reader must feel aesthetic joy while a fictional world is re-created for
each reader. The function of the writers to introduce order where there was none; find
unity of mind in the assortment of things scattered around.

As to go on in this brief succession of events and movements is time to come

across postmodern literature. There are some philosophies that construct the basement
to reach this moment. Edmund Husserlci and Heideggercii, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, started in Germany, with phenomenologyciii. This new trend spread to
France and the United States. Basically Husserl proclaimed a structure of consciousness
and the phenomenon, objects of analysis. This new point of view modified dramatically
the involvement of the first person, so that appeared “my” consciousness. Nonetheless
this new theory was criticized by their developers, (Husserl and Heidegger), and by
existentialist like Merleau-Pontyciv, Sartrecv, Levinascvi and von Hildebrandcvii. The
differences between Husserl and Heidegger developed existential phenomenology.
On the politic side this philosophy, especially Heidegger has influenced the
German Nationalism where the youth acted detached of hope and where the goal was
more important than the feelings. They worshiped the Nation and the Race. Later this
features will appear in literature in some writers backing the position and in some others
criticising. Just to see again how Eastern took this wave, it is possible state that was
welcome. The point laid in the fact that Heidegger philosophy had echoes particularly in
Zen Buddhism cviiiand Taoismcix. Both halves of the world at this moment use a different
word but the same concept Daseincx; a German word which has no translations but as a
concept could be: “be here”. However, the are some rumours that things happened the
other way round, that Heidegger grabbed the concept from the teachings given by “The
Book of Teacxi” written by Okakura Kakuzocxii that he got through Imamichicxiii.
To consider the name of a period we have also to be aware that any writer who
went one step forward the movement in which he/ she was born is considered as
“modern” so that we can find the word modern again and again. The environment which
allowed this change of mind were, mainly, two devastating wars, great technological
changes the rise of power as corporations, improvement in communications and
transportation. West was formed by the agglutination of North America and Europe. As
a consequence of this “West” comes for the other side of the planet into the necessity to
imitate this new forceful society. The main things that these Asian cultures wanted to
copy were: industrialization, individual political rights, private ownership of the means
of production, the scientific method, an own idea of religion, believe or not in God and
also the emancipation of women.
The literature of those times was built on the expressionism cxiv, impressionismcxv,
surrealismcxvi, absurdismcxvii and nihilismcxviii. The aim of modern literature was to care
and study the psychology of the man as the main difference with realism where was
portrayed the daily life of ordinary people; realism had verisimilitude while surrealism
liberated the subconscious in order to overlook the network behind logical mind ,
denying in this way the authority of rationality. Where realism worshiped reason and
rationality, absurdism tried to trace and copy the absurd condition that human beings
were going through; this has to be interpreted in the sense of the absurd of the wars, the
horror of holocausts, just for the Reich and the one by A-bomb. In some way the
absence of God leaving man in an unknown world void of spirituality. Foremost
characteristics of Modernism in literature come from the use of symbols, colloquial
language, the use of language in a self- conscious way in such way that the reader can
feel that the writer is modelling each word to give the special sense necessary in the
description of psychology , and the way the words are link in absurdism. The authors of
that period change not only their own generation but also the following. This new way
of writing became very influential, what is more, there is a break- before and after- the
reader comes across this movement. In the step from Modernism to Postmodernism we
find some differences. It is important make a difference in the connotation of high
literary modernism, which describes a sub-genre of literally modernism. This writings
have been written in the span between both World Wars .According to Andreas
Huyssencxix calls the “Great Divide” Art (with capital letter) and mass culture. He also
speaks about a canonical list, what has to be interpret as a list where are all the names
that any educated person should have read
In Modernism faith, values, culture, norms of the West are rejected, Modernism
attempts to reveal the profound sense of experience and life and Postmodernism only
relies on the ideas based on Western value system. Modern writers controlled the
readers’ reaction while the Postmodern create an open work where the reader has to
provide the connections and interpretation. In Modernism we find the change in the
omniscient narrator cxxreplaced by the point of view of any individual, so we can find
more than one narrator throughout the book. Another important change is in the
representation, no more continuity, the writers develop a break of the sequence and the
cause – effect is highlight, there is fragmentation and juxtaposition. The psychological
reality is what makes the stream of consciousness as the main feature, the one that
compile the elements

As it was already mentioned the fact of the wars arouse in writers the necessity
of communicate the horrors left behind for such events, Japan was not different tan west
and it was during this period when many writers saw the light. However, we have to
bear in mind that Japan was defeated and so we find a different discourse in their
writing, they have to put up with the defeat and all the implication referred to honour
that this matter had. Also the A-Bomb gave to writers a theme vast and painful to report,
but necessary to write in order to let people of the world know the sufferings they went
through. There is also another important feature , many of those writers committed
suicide; Osamu Dazaicxxi ( The Setting Suncxxii) and Yukio Mishimacxxiii in his nihilistic
style and moreover considering that he committed seppukucxxiv a ritual suicide after
having written the fourth book of his famous tetralogy. During the Avant Gardecxxv
period (1960) we find Kobo Abecxxvi with his “Woman in the Dunescxxvii” and Masuji
Ibusecxxviii who wrote “Black Raincxxix”, whose book won international approval and
prizes among those was the Noma Prizecxxx and The Order of Cultural Merit. The book
narrated the bombing of Hiroshima. Just in the 1979`s Kenzaburo Oe cxxxi won the Nobel
Prize “A Personal Mattercxxxii”. Then came was known as the third generation of writers
and here fits Shusaku Endocxxxiii who wrote about the perspective of being catholic and
Japanese, his book Silence cxxxivhas the same theme as the one of Graham Greenecxxxv ,
“The Power and The Glorycxxxvi”. Here again both sides get in touch. There is neither
West nor East there is humankind with the great need of writing expressing the deep and
profound pain of being human.
So to conclude I will stress the fact that literature is something alive, in constant
change. The network built among writers develops a great movement that today is easy
to follow just because of the improvement of communication. However, it is important
to highlight the fact that society is living a kind of illiteracy, where images win the arm-
wrestling because youth has not grip the habit of reading. PC games occupy the place of
good books. Another item to consider is that people are reducing the quantity and
variety of words. In spite of being a huge advance all things related to Internet, there are
things that, for need, or laziness are put aside, I mean in the case of vocabulary the
misuse or not use of formal and educated language impoverish the communication. On
the other hand the fact that to be in touch with everybody( The case of Internet and
chats) is easier to use signs, we drop directly again to structuralism and we have already
stepped forward. It is necessary, perhaps the construction- with all the things we have up
to now- and new things- that are from the globalization, to make a new global culture
enriched by the contribution of all the cultures, and not reduce language and as a
consequence literature and all the matters related to art. In this big bag we have to
consider films, paintings, sculptures. But also it is necessary the fact that all the other
matters, as economy, biology, politics are woven into the same net, so that they will also
gain in this new concept.
These great writers had a public who was really involved with all the events
around. Nowadays there is not commitment we can see lot of people feeling alone,
without any own idea, people who are wandering toward the nothingness – no the same
that talked Sartre-but the one that could have nearly an apocalyptic view- so that what
we need is to turn again toward literature. There are people who fought for ideals
through the lines of a book. Vaclav Havelcxxxvii, who once was prisoner- dissident and
then he turned to be the president of Czechoslovakia. He wrote all the criticism to the
regime. He started his struggle in the 1960´s during the Cold War cxxxviii- known as the
Prague Springcxxxix - and with other dissident wrote a manifesto – Charter 77cxl- where
they establish their commitment with human rights. Movements always have their own
manifesto. Here is mixture of literature and politic fight, but to spread ideas and ideals
the written word is the best mean throughout history and the one who lasted I daresay
forever.
i
Natsume Sōseki : (9 February 1867 – 9 December 1916) was the pen name of Natsume
Kinnosuke (who is widely considered to be the foremost Japanese novelist of the Meiji Era (1868–
1912). He is commonly referred to as Sōseki. He is best known for his novels Kokoro, Botchan, I
Am a Cat and his unfinished work Light and Darkness. He was also a scholar of British literature
and composer of haiku, Chinese-style poetry, and fairy tales. In 1900, the Japanese government sent
Sōseki to study in Great Britain. He visited Cambridge and stayed a night there, but gave up the
idea of studying at the university because he could not afford it on his government scholarship. He
had a miserable time of it in London, spending most of his days indoors buried in books, and his
friends feared that he might be losing his mind
ii
Homer: traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek epic poems the Iliad and the
Odyssey, as well as of the Homeric Hymns. Today the hymns are considered to be later works but
many still regard Homer as the author or compiler of the epics. The ancient Greeks generally
believed that Homer was a historical individual, but most modern scholars are skeptical: G. S.
Kirk's comment that "Antiquity knew nothing definite about the life and personality of Homer;"
represents the general consensus. Some scholars believe that the poems themselves manifestly
represent the culmination of many centuries of oral story-telling and a well-developed "formulaic"
system of poetic composition, so according to Martin West, "Homer" is "not the name of a historical
poet, but a fictitious or constructed name."
iii
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish expatriate
author of the 20th century. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its
controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners
(1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916).Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional
universe is firmly rooted in his native Dublin, the city which provides the settings and much of the
subject matter for all his fiction. In particular, his tempestuous early relationship with the Irish
Roman Catholic Church is reflected through a similar inner conflict in his recurrent alter ego
Stephen Dedalus. As the result of his minute attentiveness to a personal locale and his self-imposed
exile and influence throughout Europe, notably in Paris, Joyce became paradoxically one of the
most cosmopolitan yet one of the most regionally focused of all the English language writers of his
time.

iv
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and antihero of James Joyce's novel Ulysses,
assuming the role of the 'Odysseus' character. Like the Greek hero in The Odyssey, he is absent at
the beginning of the story, and does not feature until episode four of the novel (itself the opening
episode of part two). Joyce introduces Bloom to the reader with the distinctive (and now semi-
famous) words: Born in 1866, Bloom is the only son of Rudolf Virág (a Hungarian from
Szombathely who emigrated to Ireland, converted from Judaism to Protestantism, changed his name
to Rudolph Bloom and later committed suicide), and of Ellen Higgins, an Irish Protestant. They
lived in Clanbrassil Street, Portobello. He married Marion (Molly) Tweedy on 8 October 1888. The
couple have one daughter, Millicent (Milly), born in 1889; their son Rudolph (Rudy), born in
December 1893, died after eleven days. The family live at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin.
v
Science fiction (abbreviated SF or sci-fi with varying punctuation and capitalization)

Modernist literature: is the literary expression of the tendencies of Modernism, especially High
vi

modernism. Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the
middle 1920s
vii
Symbolism: was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry
and other arts.
 Structuralism: is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for
viii

instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work
of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). But many French intellectuals perceived it to have a wider
application, and the model was soon modified and applied to other fields, such as anthropology,
psychoanalysis, literary theory and architecture. This ushered in the dawn of structuralism as not
just a method, but also an intellectual movement that came to take existentialism's pedestal in 1960s
France
ix
Deconstructivism: it is a development of postmodern architecture that began in the late 1980s. It
is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and
dislocate some of the elements of architecture. This unpredictable style gives as final result the
control of chaos. This concept reached literature and other arts.
x
Postmodernism: (or, familiarly, Pomo) literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While
"modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the
following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical theory
to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema, and design, as
well as in marketing and business and in the interpretation of history, law, culture and religion in
the late 20th century
xi
The bombing of Guernica (April 26, 1937) was an aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica,
causing widespread destruction and civilian deaths during the Spanish Civil War. The raid by planes
of the German Luftwaffe "Condor Legion" and the Italian Fascist Aviazione Legionaria was called
Operation Rügen. More than 1,000 people were reported killed, but modern research suggests
between 200 to 250 civilians died Western countries viewed Guernica as an example of ‘terror
bombing,' and it gave them the impression that the Luftwaffe was equipped and committed to such
a policy. The bombing was the subject of a famous anti-war painting by Pablo Picasso. Guernica is
a painting by Pablo Picasso, depicting the bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight German
bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Republican government
commissioned Pablo Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the Exposition
Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) Paris International Exposition in
the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon
individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a
perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On
completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely
acclaimed. This tour helped bring the Spanish civil war to the world's attention.
xii
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de
la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter,
draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art, he is best
known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his
work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and
Guernica (1937), his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
xiii
The Spanish Civil War was a major conflict that devastated Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April
1939. It began after an attempted coup d'état against the government of the Second Spanish
Republic, then under the leadership of president Manuel Azaña, by a group of Spanish Army
generals, supported by the conservative Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas
(C.E.D.A), Carlist groups and the fascistic Falange Española de las J.O.N.S. The war ended with
the victory of the rebel forces, the overthrow of the Republican government, and the founding of a
dictatorship led by General Francisco Franco. In the aftermath of the civil war, all right-wing parties
were fused into the state party of the Franco regime. Republicans (republicanos) were supported by
the Soviet Union and Mexico, while the followers of the rebellion, nationalists (nacionales),
received the support of Italy and Germany, as well as neighbouring Portugal.The war increased
international tensions in Europe in the lead-up to World War II, and was largely seen as a proxy war
between the Communist Soviet Union and the Fascists of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Nazi
Germany. In particular, new tank warfare tactics and the terror bombing of cities from the air were
features of the Spanish war which played a significant part in the later general European war.

xiv
William Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was a Nobel Prize-winning American
author. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his reputation is based on his novels,
novellas and short stories. However, he was also a published poet and an occasional screenwriter.
Most of Faulkner's works are set in his native state of Mississippi, and he is considered one of the
most important Southern writers, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor,
Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams. While his work was published regularly
starting in the mid 1920s, Faulkner was relatively unknown before receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize
in Literature. He is now deemed among the greatest American writers of all time.

xv
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges
Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in
music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as "Analytic Cubism", was both radical and
influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France. In its
second phase, Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when
the Surrealist movement gained popularity. English art historian Douglas Cooper describes three
phases of Cubism in his seminal book "The Cubist Epoch". According to Cooper there was "Early
Cubism", (from 1906 to 1908) when the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso
and Braque; the second phase being called "High Cubism", (from 1909 to 1914) during which time
Juan Gris emerged as an important exponent; and finally Cooper referred to "Late Cubism" (from
1914 to 1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement. In cubist artworks,
objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting
objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to
represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles,
removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to
create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.
xvi
The Sound and the Fury is one of the most celebrated novels of the twentieth century, written
by American author William Faulkner, which makes use of the stream of consciousness narrative
technique pioneered by European authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The novel takes
place in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and is split into four sections. The first is from the
viewpoint of Benjy Compson, a thirty-three year old man with mental retardation. The second
segment is set eighteen years earlier than the other three and is told from the point of view of
Quentin Compson, a Harvard-educated student who commits suicide after a series of events
involving his sister Caddy. The third is from the point of view of their cynical, embittered brother,
Jason, and the fourth is from a third-person-limited-omniscient narrative point-of-view focused on
Dilsey, the Compson family's black servant, and her unbiased point of view, which allows the reader
to make his or her own assumptions from the actions of the other characters. Jason is also a focus in
the section, but Faulkner gives glimpses of thoughts and actions from everyone in the family. The
story overall summarizes the lives of people in the Compson family that has by now fallen into ruin.
Many passages are written in a stream of consciousness. This novel is a classic example of the
unreliable narrator technique.
xvii
Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet,
novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his
 work. He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States
Library of Congress in 1965.
xviii
William Butler Yeats; (13 June 1865–28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist and one
of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary
Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, and served
as its chief during its early years. In 1923, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature for what the
Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to
the spirit of a whole nation;" and he was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered
one of the few writers whose greatest works were completed after being awarded the Nobel Prize;
such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929)Yeats was
born and educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his
youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics
feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest
volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slowly paced and lyrical poems display debts to
Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the lyricism of the Pre-Raphaelite poets.
From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental
beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as
with cyclical theories of life. Over the years, Yeats adopted many different ideological positions,
including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, "those of radical nationalist, classical
liberal, reactionary conservative and millenarian nihilist”.
xix
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain
Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka, privately published in 1925, was a book-length study of
various philosophical, historical, astrological, and poetic topics by the Irish poet William Butler
Yeats. Yeats wrote these works while experimenting with automatic writing with his wife George,
and they were an exploration of his interest in occult astrology. The works serves as a meditation on
the relationships between imagination, history, and the occult. A Vision has been compared to
Eureka: A Prose Poem, the final major work of Edgar Allan Poe.
xx
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (9 April 1821 - 31 August 1867) was a nineteenth century French
poet, critic, and translator. A controversial figure in his lifetime, Baudelaire's name has become a
byword for literary and artistic decadence. At the same time his works, in particular his book of
poetry Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), have been acknowledged as classics of French
literature.
xxi
Note on Japanese Names: Japanese names throughout the book, except those of Japanese-
Americans, are written in Japanese order -- surname first -- the style Japanologists have adopted in
their studies in English. In Karatani Kōjin, for example, Karatani is his family name, and Kōjin his
given (or "first") name. Even when the writer adopts a sobriquet, this order is followed. To
complicate things, however, writers are known in Japan sometimes by their surname and sometimes
by their "given" name. Natsume Sōseki ( Natsume Kinnosuke), for instance, is usually known as
Sōseki, not as Natsume, whereas a more recent writer like Mishima Yukio ( Hiraoka Kimitake or
Kōi) is known as Mishima. It seems that as a writer comes to be accepted into the "great tradition"
(usually a while after his death), he comes to be known more by his given name than his surname.
This book follows the current usage in this regard- Postmodernism and Japan. Contributors: Massao
Miyoshi - editor, H. D. Harootunian - editor. Publisher: Duke University Press. Place of Publication:
Durham, NC. Publication Year: 1989. Page Number: xxi. -

xxii
Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce, which is recognised for
its difficulty for the reader and its experimental style. Joyce's final work, it was written in Paris over
a period of 17 years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death. The entire book is
written in an idiosyncratic language (one invented and spoken by only one or a very few people),
consisting of multilingual puns (is a form of word play that deliberately exploits ambiguity between
similar-sounding words for humorous or rhetorical effect. Such ambiguity may arise from the
intentional misuse of homophonical, homographical, homonymic, polysemic, metonymic, or
metaphorical language) and portmanteau words (is used broadly to mean a blend of two (or more)
words, and narrowly in linguistics fields to mean only a blend of two or more function words),
which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Due to its expansive linguistic
experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and
its abandonment of conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely
unread by the general public.
xxiii
Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century".
xxiv
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (February 5, 1848 – May 12, 1907) was a French novelist
who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans; he is most famous for the novel À rebours
(Against Nature or Wrong Way). His style is remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French
language, wide-ranging vocabulary, wealth of detailed and sensuous description, and biting,
satirical wit. The novels are also noteworthy for their encyclopaedic documentation, ranging from
the catalogue of decadent Latin authors in À rebours to the discussion of the iconography of
Christian architecture in La cathédrale. Huysmans' work expresses a disgust with modern life and a
deep pessimism, which led the author first to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer then to the
teachings of the Catholic Church
xxv
À rebours (translated into English as Against the Grain or Against Nature) (1884) is a novel
by the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. It is a novel in which very little happens; its narrative
concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and
inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th
century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. À
rebours contained many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so,
it broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature
xxvi
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish
playwright, poet and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he
became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the
greatest celebrities of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The
Importance of Being Earnest. As the result of a widely covered series of trials, Wilde suffered a
dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two years hard labour after being convicted of "gross
indecency" with other men. After Wilde was released from prison he set sail for Dieppe by the night
ferry. He never returned to Ireland or Britain.
xxvii
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel written by Oscar Wilde, The story is
often miscalled The Portrait of Dorian Gray. The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray,
the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is greatly impressed by Dorian's physical
beauty and becomes strongly infatuated with him, believing that his beauty is responsible for a new
mode in his art. Talking in Basil's garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and
becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new kind of hedonism, Lord Henry
suggests that the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and the fulfilment of the senses.
Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, expressing his desire to sell his soul to
ensure that the portrait Basil has painted of him would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is
fulfilled, subsequently plunging him into a series of debauched acts. The portrait serves as a
reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin being displayed as a disfigurement
of his form, or through a sign of aging. The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered one of the last
works of classic gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme. It deals with the artistic
movement of the decadents, and homosexuality, both of which caused some controversy when the
book was first published. However, in recent times, the book has been regarded as one of the
modern classics of Western literature.
xxviii
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry
and other arts. In literature, the movement has its roots in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil,
1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire greatly admired and
translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images.
The aesthetic was developed by Stephane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. In
the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated through a series of manifestoes and attracted a generation of
writers. The label "Symbolist" itself comes from the critic Jean Moréas, who coined it in order to
distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadent movement in literature and art. Distinct from,
but related to, the movement in literature, Symbolism in art represents an outgrowth of the darker,
gothic side of Romanticism; but where Romanticism was impetuous and rebellious, Symbolist art
was static and hieratic.
xxix

xxx
Darwinism is a term used for various movements or concepts related to ideas of transmutation of
species or evolution, including ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin. The
meaning of Darwinism has changed over time, and varies depending on who is using the term. In
modern usage, particularly in the United States, Darwinism is often used by creationists as a
pejorative term
xxxi
Positivism is a philosophy which holds that the only authentic knowledge is that based on actual
sense experience. Metaphysical speculation is avoided. Though the positivist approach has been a
'recurrent theme in the history of western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day' and
appears in Ibn al-Haytham's 11th Century text Book of Optics, the concept was first coined by
Auguste Comte, widely considered the first modern sociologist, in the middle of the 19th century. In
the early 20th century, logical positivism—a stricter and more formal version of Comte's basic
thesis—sprang up in Vienna and grew to become one of the dominant movements in American and
British philosophy. The positivist view is sometimes referred to as a scientist ideology, and is often
shared by technocrats who believe in the necessity of progress through scientific progress, and by
naturalists, who argue that any method for gaining knowledge should be limited to natural, physical,
and material approaches. In psychology, a positivistic approach is favoured by behaviourism.
xxxii
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and
printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in
the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been
said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English
language". His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest
artist Britain has ever produced". Although he only once journeyed farther than a day's walk outside
London during his lifetime, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced
'imagination' as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself ".
xxxiii
The Age of Enlightenment or simply The Enlightenment is a term used to describe a time in
Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was
advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority
xxxiv
The Baroque was a Western cultural period, starting roughly at the beginning of the 17th
century in Rome, Italy. The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the
Roman Catholic Church, which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent that the arts should
communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The aristocracy also saw the
dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and expressing
triumphant power and control. Baroque palaces are built around an entrance of courts, grand
staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence.
xxxv
The Ottoman Empire or Ottoman State Modern Turkish:, also known by its contemporaries as
the Turkish Empire or Turkey, was an empire that lasted from 1299 to November 1, 1922 (as an
imperial monarchy) or July 24, 1923 (de jure, as a state.) It was succeeded by the Republic of
Turkey, which was officially proclaimed on October 29, 1923. The term used to refer to the citizens
of the Ottoman Empire after 1839, when the Tanzimat edict starting a period of reforms was
declared . The term was started to be used more commonly especially after the empire officially
became a constitutional monarchy in 1876. It was used for all the people living in the empire no
matter what their religious or ethnic group was. The term was abolished when the Republic of
Turkey was declared in 1923.
xxxvi
The Tanzimat , meaning reorganization of the Ottoman Empire, was a period of reformation
that began in 1839 and ended with the First Constitutional Era in 1876. The Tanzimat reform era
was characterized by various attempts to modernize the Ottoman Empire, to secure its territorial
integrity against nationalist movements and aggressive powers. The reforms encouraged
Ottomanism among the diverse ethnic groups of the Empire, attempting to stem the tide of
nationalist movements within the Ottoman Empire. The reforms attempted to integrate non-
Muslims and non-Turks more thoroughly into Ottoman society by enhancing their civil liberties and
granting them equality throughout the Empire.
xxxvii
The Qajar dynasty is a common term to describe Iran (then known as Persia) under the ruling
Qajar royal family that ruled Iran from 1794 to 1925. In 1794 the Qajar family took full control of
Iran as they had eliminated all their rivals, including Lotf 'Ali Khan, the last of the Zand dynasty,
and had reasserted Persian sovereignty over the former Iranian territories in Georgia and the
Caucasus. In 1796 Āghā Moḥammad Khān was formally crowned as shah (emperor or king).
xxxviii
Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (July 16, 1831 – May 1, 1896) was the King and Shah of Persia
from September 17, 1848 to May 1, 1896 when he was assassinated. He was the son of Mohammad
Shah Qajar and the third longest reigning monarch king in Persian history after Shapur II of the
Sassanid Dynasty and Tahmasp I of the Safavid Dynasty. He had sovereign power for close to 50
years and was also the first Persian monarch to ever write and publish his diaries.

The Mughal era is the historic period of the Mughal Empire in India, it ran from the early
xxxix

sixteenth century, to a point in the early eighteenth century when the Mughal Emperors' power had
dwindled. It ended in several generations of conflicts between rival warlords. India in the 16th
century had numerous unpopular rulers, both Muslim and Hindu, with an absence of common
bodies of laws or institutions. External developments also played a role in the rise of the Mughal
Empire. The circumnavigation of Africa by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1498
allowed Europeans to challenge Arab control of the trading routes between Europe and Asia. In
Central Asia and Afghanistan, shifts in power pushed Babur of Ferghana (in present-day
Uzbekistan) southward, first to Kabul and then to India. The Mughal Empire lasted for more than
three centuries. The Mughal Empire was one of the largest centralized states in premodern history
and was the precursor to the British Indian Empire.
xl
British Raj primarily refers to the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947;
it can also refer to the period of dominion, and even the region under the rule. The region,
commonly called India in contemporary usage, included areas directly administered by the United
Kingdom, as well as the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the paramountcy of the
British Crown. After 1876, the resulting political union was officially called the Indian Empire and
issued passports under that name. As India, it was a founding member of the League of Nations, the
United Nations, and a member nation of the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1920, 1928, 1932, and
1936.
xli
On February 3, 1867, sixteen-year old Mutsuhito succeeded his father, Emperor Kōmei and a new
era of Meiji, meaning "enlightened rule," was proclaimed. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended
the 265-year-old feudalistic Tokugawa shogunate. The first reform was the promulgation of the Five
Charter Oath in 1868, a general statement of the aims of the Meiji leaders to boost morale and win
financial support for the new government. Its five provisions consisted of:1) Establishment of
deliberative assemblies ; 2) Involvement of all classes in carrying out state affairs; 3) The
revocation of sumptuary laws and class restrictions on employment ;4) Replacement of "evil
customs" with the "just laws of nature" and 5) An international search for knowledge to strengthen
the foundations of imperial rule.
xlii
The New Culture Movement of the mid 1910s and 1920s sprang from the disillusionment with
traditional Chinese culture following the failure of the Chinese Republic founded in 1912 to address
China’s problems. Scholars like Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, and Hu Shi, had
classical educations but began to lead a revolt against Confucian culture. They called for the
creation of a new Chinese culture based on global and western standards, especially democracy and
science. Younger followers took up their call for: a)Vernacular literature ; b) An end to the
patriarchal family in favor of individual freedom and women's liberation ;c) An acceptance of
China’s place as a nation among nations, rather than the assertion of superiority of Confucian
culture; d) The re-examination of Confucian texts and ancient classics using modern textual and
critical methods, known as the Doubting Antiquity School; e) Democratic and egalitarian values
;h)An orientation to the future rather than the past. .n May 4, 1919, students in Beijing protested the
Paris Peace Conference giving German rights over Shandong to Imperial Japan, turning this cultural
movement into a political one in what became known as the May Fourth Movement.
xliii
Neo-romanticism: is used to cover a variety of movements in music and painting. It has been
used with reference to very late 19th century and early 20th century composers such as Gustav
Mahler particularly by Dalhaus who uses it as synonymous with late Romanticism. It has been
applied to contemporary composers who rejected or abandoned the use of the devices of avant-
garde modernism
xliv
Antinaturalism: is a view in sociology which states that the natural world and the social world
are different. It is closely related to antipositivism, and is the opposite of sociological naturalism.
xlv
Ibid.

xlvi
Rationalism: is the philosophical view that regards reason as the chief source and test of
knowledge. Holding that reality itself has an inherently logical structure, the Rationalist asserts that
a class of truths exists that the intellect can grasp directly. There are, according to the Rationalists,
certain rational principles—especially in logic and mathematics, and even in ethics and metaphysics
—that are so fundamental that to deny them is to fall into contradiction. The Rationalist’s
confidence in reason and proof tends, therefore, to detract from his respect for other ways of
knowing.
xlvii
Tōson Shimazaki (25 March 1872 – 22 August 1943) is the pen-name of a Japanese author,
active in the Meiji, Taishō and early Showa period Japan. He began his career as a poet, but went on
to establish himself as the major proponent of naturalism in Japanese literature. His real name was
Shimazaki Haruki. He wrote about many aspects of life in this area, including in his most famous
novel Before the Dawn, which was modeled on the life of his father, Shimazaki Masaki, who went
insane and died by the time Tōson was fourteen, leading to Tōson being raised by friends of his
family. Later, his oldest sister would also die from mental disorders. Tōson later described his
nature as "melancholy inherited from my parents."
xlviii
Naturalism: is a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as
opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly
symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalism is the outgrowth of Realism, a
prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere. Naturalistic writers were
influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. They believed that one's heredity and social
environment determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they
really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (i.e. the
environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often include
uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, Émile Zola's works had frankness about sexuality
along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including
poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution, and filth. As a result, Naturalistic writers were
frequently criticized for being too blunt.
xlix
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant: (5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a popular 19th-
century French writer and considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. A protégé of
Flaubert, Maupassant's stories are characterized by their economy of style and their efficient,
effortless dénouement. Many of the stories are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s and
several describe the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught in the conflict, emerge
changed. He also wrote six short novels
l
Émile François Zola: (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was an influential French writer, the
most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism, an important contributor to the
development of theatrical naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France and
in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus.
li
Henrik Johan Ibsen: (20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian
playwright of realistic drama and poet. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama" and
is one of the founders of modernism in the theatre. Alongside Olav Duun and Knut Hamsun, Ibsen
is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors, celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians, and
one of the most important playwrights of all time. His plays were considered scandalous to many of
his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe and any
challenge to them was considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen's work examined the realities that
lay behind many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many
contemporaries.

lii
Naoya Shiga (20 February 1883 – 21 October 1971) was a novelist and short story writer active
in Taishō and Showa period Japan.. His literary career began with a handwritten literary magazine
Boya ("Perspective"), which was circulated within their literary group at the school. In 1910 Shiga
contributed the story Abashiri made ("To Abashiri") to the first issue of the literary magazine
Shirakaba ("White Birch"). In longer works Shiga generally adhered to the indigenous I Novel
literary form, which uses the author's subjective recollection of his own experiences, but he
established his reputation with a number of short stories, including Kamisori ("The Razor", 1910),
Seibei no hyotan ("Seibei and the Gourd", 1913) and Manazuru ("Manazuru", 1920). These were
followed by novels, including Otsu Junkichi (1912), Wakai ("Reconciliation", 1917), and his major
work, An'ya Koro ("A Dark Night's Passing", 1921-1937), which was serialized in the radical
socialist magazine Kaizo. Shiga's terse style influenced many later writers, and was praised by
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Agawa Hiroyuki. However, other contemporaries, notably Dazai
Osamu, were strongly critical of this "sincere" style.
liii
Humanism: is a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all
people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appealing to universal human qualities,
particularly rationality, without resorting to the supernatural or alleged divine authority from
religious texts. It is a component of a variety of more specific philosophical systems. Humanism
can be considered as a process by which truth and morality is sought through human investigation;
as such, views on morals can change when new knowledge and information is discovered. In
focusing on the capacity for self-determination, humanism rejects transcendental justifications, such
as a dependence on faith, the supernatural, or texts of allegedly divine origin. Humanists endorse
universal morality based on the commonality of the human condition, suggesting that solutions to
human social and cultural problems cannot be parochial.

liv
Takiji Kobayashi: (October 13, 1903 – February 20, 1933) was a Japanese author of proletarian
literature. In the spring of 1930 he moved to Tokyo and became the secretary general of the
Proletarian Writer's Guild of Japan. Due to Kanikosen he was further indicted on charges of Lèse
majesté. Kanikōsen (published in English as The Crab Canning Ship or The Crab Ship) is a novel
by Takiji Kobayashi, written in 1929. Written from a left-wing point of view, it concerns the crew of
a crab fishing ship's hardships as they struggle under capitalist exploitation. The book has been
made into a film and as manga. It is a short work, totalling around 80 pages in its English language
translation.
lv
Denji Kuroshima: (December 12, 1898 – October 17, 1943) was a Japanese author One of
modern Japan's most dedicated antimilitarist intellectuals, Kuroshima Denji is best known for his
Siberian stories of the late 1920s – vivid descriptions of agonies suffered by Japanese soldiers and
Russian civilians during Japan's invasion of the newly emerged Soviet Union. Kuroshima also
wrote powerful narratives dealing with the hardships, struggles, and rare triumphs of Japanese
peasants. His only full-length novel, Militarized Streets, a shocking description of economic and
military aggression against China, was censored not only by Japan's imperial government, but by
the US occupation authorities as well. Kuroshima's narratives—like those of Anton Chekhov,
whom Kuroshima greatly admired—are unadorned in style, straightforward in storytelling, and
attentive to detail. Their content conveys a sense of authenticity, grief over the unnecessary
suffering, and above all the urgent need for change. Despite occasional flashes of humor and
lyricism, the tone is seldom cheerful and happy endings are rare: Kuroshima refrains from
accomplishing in fiction what is much harder to attain in actuality. Devoid of easy optimism, his
stories are open-ended chronicles of abuse and resistance.
lvi
Yuriko Miyamoto: (13 February 1899–21 January 1951) was a novelist in Taisho period Japan.
Her maiden name was Chūjō Yuriko. The Banshū Plain is a soberly detailed account of Japan in
August and September 1945. The opening chapter of The Banshū Plain depicts the day of Japan's
surrender. The setting is a rural town in northern Japan, where Yuriko, represented by the
protagonist Hiroko, was living as an evacuee at the war's end. The chapter captures the sense of
confusion with which many Japanese received the news of surrender—Hiroko's brother cannot
explain what is happening to his children, while local farmers become drunk. Miyamoto depicts a
"moral bankruptcy" which is the major theme of the novel and which is shown as the most tragic
legacy of the war. The Weathervane Plant provides a thinly fictionalized account of Yuriko's
reunion with her husband after his release from twelve years of wartime imprisonment. The couple's
adjustment to living together again is shown as often painful. Despite many years of activism in the
socialist women's movement, she is hurt when her husband indicates that she has become too tough
and too independent after living alone during the war. Miyamoto also published a collection of
essays and literary criticism Fujin to Bungaku (Women and Literature, 1947), a collection of some
of the 900 letters between her and her imprisoned husband Juninen no tegami (Letters of Twelve
Years, 1950-1952), and the novels Futatsu no niwa (Two Gardens, 1948) and Dōhyō (Mileposts,
1950).
lvii
Ineko Sata: (1 June 1904 – 12 October 1998) was a communist and feminist Japanese author of
proletarian literature. As a member of the Proletarian Literature Movement, she wrote a series of
novels on the lives of ordinary working men and women. These included Kyoseikikoku
(Compulsory Extradition), about the rights of migrant Korean workers and Kambu joko no namida
(Tears of a Forewoman). Sata was awarded the Noma Prize in 1972 for her book Juei (The Shade of
Trees), which deals with the relationships between Chinese and Japanese people in Nagasaki after
the dropping of the atomic bomb. In 1973, she was offered the Geijutuin Onshisho (Imperial Art
Academy Prize) for her life's work, but she refused the award as she regarded it as a nationalist
congratulation prize. She accepted the Kawabata Prize for short stories in 1977. In 1983, she
received the Asahi Prize for the entire body of her work. She gave an acceptance speech which
expressed regret for her contributions to the war effort.

Ineko Sata: (1 June 1904 – 12 October 1998) was a communist and feminist Japanese author of
proletarian literature. As a member of the Proletarian Literature Movement, she wrote a series of
novels on the lives of ordinary working men and women. These included Kyoseikikoku
(Compulsory Extradition), about the rights of migrant Korean workers and Kambu joko no namida
(Tears of a Forewoman). Sata was awarded the Noma Prize in 1972 for her book Juei (The Shade of
Trees), which deals with the relationships between Chinese and Japanese people in Nagasaki after
the dropping of the atomic bomb. In 1973, she was offered the Geijutuin Onshisho (Imperial Art
Academy Prize) for her life's work, but she refused the award as she regarded it as a nationalist
congratulation prize. She accepted the Kawabata Prize for short stories in 1977. In 1983, she
received the Asahi Prize for the entire body of her work. She gave an acceptance speech which
expressed regret for her contributions to the war effort.
lviii
Dada or Dadaism: is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War
I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.[1] The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—
poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war
politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Dada
activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals;
passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media.
The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and
groups including surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop art, Fluxus and punk rock. Dada is the
groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to
postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of anti-art to be later embraced for anarcho-
political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.

Richard Huelsenbeck: (April 23, 1892 - April 20, 1974) was a poet, writer and drummer born in
lix

Frankenau, Hesse-Nassau. Carl Wilhelm Richard Hülsenbeck was a medical student on the eve of
World War I. He was invalided out of the army and emigrated to Zürich, Switzerland in February
1916, where he fell in with the Cabaret Voltaire. In January 1917, he moved to Berlin, taking with
him the ideas and techniques which helped him found the Berlin Dada group. 'To make literature
with a gun in my hand had for a time been my dream,' he wrote in 1920. His ideas fitted in with
left-wing politics current at time in Berlin. However, idealistic Huelsenbeck and his companions
were their challenge 'Dada is German Bolshevism' had unfortunate repercussions later, when the
National Socialists denounced all aspects of modern art as Kunstbolschewismus. Later in life, he
moved to New York City, where he practiced Jungian psychoanalysis under the name Charles R.
Hulbeck. In 1970 he returned to the Ticino region of Switzerland. He died 1974 in Muralto,
Switzerland. Huelsenbeck was the editor of the Dada Almanach, and wrote Dada Sieght, En Avant
Dada and other Dadaist works. Huelsenbeck's autobiography Memoirs of a Dada Drummer gives
detailed accounts of his interactions with many key figures of the movement. Of his music, Hugo
Ball wrote, "Huelsenbeck has arrived. He pleads for an intensification of rhythm (Negro rhythm).
He would best love to drum literature & to perdition."Until the end of his life, Huelsenbeck insisted,
"Dada is still existing," although the movement's other founders might not have agreed.
lx
The Mexican–American War: was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico
from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas. Mexico claimed ownership of
Texas as a breakaway province and refused to recognize the secession and subsequent military
victory by Texas in 1836.
lxi
Henry David Thoreau :(born David Henry Thoreau; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an
American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher,
and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple
living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual
resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state
lxii
Civil Disobedience: (Resistance to Civil Government) is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that
was first published in 1849. It argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or
atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to
enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his
disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War.

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker: (April 17, 1854 – June 22, 1939) was a leading proponent of
lxiii

American individualist anarchism in the 19th century, and editor and publisher of the individualist
anarchist periodical Liberty.

Ezra Heywood (1829-1893) was a 19th century North American individualist anarchist, slavery
lxiv

abolitionist, and feminist. Heywood saw what he believed to be a disproportionate concentration of

capital in the hands of a few as the result of a selective extension of government-backed privileges
to certain individuals and organizations.
lxv
Knut Hamsun: born Knud Pedersen (August 4, 1859 - February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian
author. He was considered by Isaac Bashevis Singer, to be the "father of modern literature", and by
King Haakon to be Norway's soul. In 1920, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Prize in
Literature, "for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil". He insisted that the intricacies of the
human mind ought to be the main object of modern literature, to describe the "whisper of the blood,
and the pleading of the bone marrow". Hamsun pursued his literary program, debuting in 1890 with
the psychological novel Hunger.
lxvi
Hunger :(Norwegian: Sult) is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published
in its final form in 1890. Parts of it had been published anonymously in the Danish magazine Ny
Jord in 1888. The novel is hailed as the literary opening of the 20th century[1] and an outstanding
example of modern, psychology-driven literature. It hails the irrationality of the human mind in an
intriguing and sometimes humorous novel. It has been translated into English three times: in 1899
by Mary Chavelita Dunne (under the alias George Egerton), by Robert Bly in 1967, and by Sverre
Lyngstad, whose translation is considered definitive.
lxvii
Adeline Virginia Woolf: (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English novelist and
essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During
the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the
Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929),
with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction."
lxviii
Ernest Miller Hemingway: (July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961) was an American writer and
journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World
War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man
and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.Hemingway's distinctive writing style is
characterized by economy and understatement, and had a significant influence on the development
of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoical men who exhibit an ideal
described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered classics of American
literature.
lxix
Thomas Stearns Eliot: OM (26 September 1888–4 January 1965), was a poet, playwright and
literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings
are the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash
Wednesday and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the
essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot was born in the United States, moved to the
United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39. Of his
nationality and its role in his work, Eliot said: "[My poetry] wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in
England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its
sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."
lxx
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer who spent most of
her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her
life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914
(Gertrude and Leo), and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946
(Gertrude and Alice). Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with
Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known
members of the avant garde artistic and literary world.
lxxi
Ibid.

lxxii
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound: (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an American
expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in the
first half of the 20th century. He is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and
promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a
seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the
generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as Robert Frost, William
Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot. Pound also
had a profound influence on Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. His own significant
contributions to poetry begin with his promotion of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived
its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and economy
of language, and forgoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in
the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for
nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos. The critic Hugh
Kenner said of Pound upon meeting him: "I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center
of modernism."
lxxiii
Ibid.

lxxiv
Franz Kafka: (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was one of the major fiction writers of the 20th
century. He was born to a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Bohemia
(presently the Czech Republic), Austria–Hungary. His unique body of writing—much of which is
incomplete and which was mainly published posthumously—is considered to be among the most
influential in Western literature. His stories include In the Penal Colony (1914) and The
Metamorphosis (1915), while his novels include The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926).
lxxv
Luigi Pirandello: (28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and
short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934.
lxxvi
Samuel Barclay Beckett: (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer, dramatist
and poet. Beckett's work offers a bleak outlook on human culture and both formally and
philosophically became increasingly minimalist. As a student, assistant, and friend of James Joyce,
Beckett is considered by many one of the last modernists; as an inspiration to many later writers, he
is sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is also considered one of the key
writers in what Martin Esslin called "Theatre of the Absurd." Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1969 for his "writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the
destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".Beckett was elected Saoi of Aosdána (Saoi pl.
saoithe; lit. "wise one"; hist. head of poetic school; master), is the highest honour that members of Aosdána, an
association of people in Ireland who have achieved distinction in the arts, can bestow upon a fellow member. No more
than seven living members can be so honoured at one time. The title of Saoi is conferred by the President of Ireland
(following election from among the membership of Aosdána) and held for life. A torc (a twist/spiral of gold, worn
around the neck) is presented to each Saoi by the President and/or Administrator ) in 1984. He died in Paris of
respiratory problems.
lxxvii
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust: (10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a
French novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of À la recherche du temps perdu (in
English, In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental
work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927.
lxxviii

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (February 10 [O.S. January 29] 1890 — May 30, 1960) was a Nobel
Prize-winning Russian poet and writer. In the West he is best known for his epic novel Doctor
Zhivago, a tragedy whose events span the last period of Tsarist Russia and the early days of the
Soviet Union. It was first translated and published in Italy in 1957. In Russia, however, Boris
Pasternak is most celebrated as a poet. My Sister Life, written in 1917, is arguably the most
influential collection of poetry published in the Russian language in the 20th century. "Boris
Pasternak [is] considered by many the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century, who helped give
birth to the dissident movement with the publication of his 'Doctor Zhivago'."
lxxix
Djuna Barnes: (12 June, 1892 – 18 June, 1982) was an American writer who played an
important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one
of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich
Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an
introduction by T. S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of lesbian themes and its distinctive
writing style. Since Barnes's death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back
in print.
lxxx
David Herbert Richards Lawrence: (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English
author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic. His collected works represent an extended
reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence
confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and
misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he
spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public
reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an
obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, "The greatest imaginative
novelist of our generation."
lxxxi
Joseph Conrad: (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924)
was a Polish-born British novelist, writing in English, while living in England. Many critics regard
him as one of the greatest novelists in the English language despite his not having learned to speak
English fluently until he was in his twenties (and then always with a strong Polish accent). He
became a naturalized British subject in 1886. He wrote stories and novels, predominantly with a
nautical setting, that depicted the heroism of faith before the imperatives of duty, social
responsibility and honor. Conrad is recognized as a master prose stylist. Some of his works have a
strain of romanticism, but more importantly he is recognized as an important forerunner of
modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers,
including Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Malcolm
Lowry, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino, Hunter S. Thompson, and
J. M. Coetzee. Conrad's novels and stories have also inspired such films as Sabotage (1936, directed
by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted from Conrad's The Secret Agent); Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse
Now (1979, adapted from Conrad's Heart of Darkness); The Duellists (a 1977 Ridley Scott
adaptation of Conrad's The Duel, from A Set of Six); and a 1996 film inspired by The Secret Agent,
starring Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette and Gérard Depardieu. Writing during the apex of the
British Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences serving in the French and later the British
Merchant Navy to create novels and short stories that reflected aspects of a worldwide empire while
also plumbing the depths of the human soul.

Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which combines some of the
lxxxii

characteristics of third-person report with first-person direct speech.

lxxxiii
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an
individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes,
either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions
lxxxiv
Juxtapostion:In linguistics and semantics contrast is a relationship between two discourse
segments.
lxxxv
A classical allusion is a reference to a classical story, religion, work of art, song, or poem.
lxxxvi
Figure of speech : An expression that uses language in a nonliteral way, such as a metaphor or
synecdoche, or in a structured or unusual way, such as anaphora or chiasmus, or that employs
sounds, such as alliteration or assonance, to achieve a rhetorical effect.

lxxxvii
Satire is often strictly defined as a literary genre or form; although, in practice, it is also found
in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or
shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other
methods, ideally with the intent to bring about improvement.
lxxxviii
Irony : is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity or discordance
between what one says or does and what one means or what is generally understood. Irony is a
mode of expression that calls attention to the character's knowledge and that of the audience.
lxxxix
Psychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian Physician Sigmund Freud and his
followers, which is devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behaviour.
xc
Symbols: iconic representations that carry particular meanings. "Symbolism" may refer to a way
of choosing representative symbols in line with abstract rather than literal properties, allowing for
the broader interpretation of a carried meaning than more literal concept-representations allow.
xci
Multiple person narrative mode. Many stories, especially in literature, alternate between the
first and third person. In this case, an author will move back and forth between a more omniscient
third-person narrator to a more personal first-person narrator. Often, a narrator using the first person
will try to be more objective by also employing the third person for important action scenes,
especially those in which he/she is not directly involved or in scenes where he/she is not present to
have viewed the events in first person. The use of multiple narrators also helps describe separate
events that occur at the same time in different locations.
xcii
Kōbō Abe pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe (Abe Kimifusa, March 7, 1924 – January 22, 1993) was
a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor. His name is romanized as Kobo Abe in
Vintage International's English-language editions of his book, while Columbia University Press
offers Three Plays by Kōbō Abe.
xciii
Ibid.

xciv
Like “rationalism” and “empiricism,” “existentialism” is a term that belongs to intellectual
history. Its definition is thus to some extent one of historical convenience. The term was explicitly
adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the
postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and his associates—notably Simone de Beauvoir,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus—existentialism became identified with a cultural
movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the major philosophers
identified as existentialists (many of whom—for instance Camus and Heidegger—repudiated the
label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean Wahl and Gabriel
Marcel in France, the Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians
Nicholai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. The nineteenth century philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard and
Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement. Existentialism was as much a
literary phenomenon as a philosophical one.
xcv
The main channel from deconstructivist philosophy to architectural theory was through the
philosopher Jacques Derrida's influence with Peter Eisenman. Eisenman drew some philosophical
bases from the literary movement Deconstruction, and collaborated directly with Derrida on
projects including an entry for the Parc de la Villette competition, documented in Chora l Works.
Derrida and Eisenman, as well as Daniel Libeskind were concerned with the "metaphysics of
presence," and this is the main subject of deconstructivist philosophy in architecture theory. The
presupposition is that architecture is a language capable of communicating meaning and of
receiving treatments by methods of linguistic philosophy. The dialectic of presence and absence, or
solid and void occurs in much of Eisenman's projects, both built and unbuilt. Both Derrida and
Eisenman believe that the locus, or place of presence, is architecture, and the same dialectic of
presence and absence is found in construction and deconstruction.
xcvi
Gérard Genette (born 1930) is a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the
structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he
adapted the concept of bricolage. He is largely responsible for the reintroduction of a rhetorical
vocabulary into literary criticism, for example such terms as trope and metonymy. Additionally his
work on narrative, best known in English through the selection Narrative Discourse: “An Essay in
Method”, has been of importance. His major work is the multi-part Figures series, of which
Narrative Discourse is a section. His international influence is not as great as that of some others
identified with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss; his work is more
often included in selections or discussed in secondary works than studied in its own right. Terms
and techniques originating in his vocabulary and systems have, however, become widespread, such
as the term paratext for prefaces, introductions, illustrations or other material accompanying the
text, or hypotext for the sources of the text.
xcvii
Rhetoric is the art of using language as a means to persuade. Along with grammar and logic or
dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. From ancient Greece to the late 19th
Century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public speakers and
writers to move audiences to action with arguments. The very act of defining has itself been a
central part of rhetoric, appearing among Aristotle's Topics.
xcviii
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980), commonly known simply
as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter,
political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century
French philosophy. The basis of Sartre's existentialism can be found in The Transcendence of the
Ego. To begin with, the thing-in-itself is infinite and overflowing. Sartre refers to any direct
consciousness of the thing-in-itself as a "pre-reflective consciousness."
xcix
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes subtitled A
Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre that is
generally regarded as the foundation for the growth of Phenomenological existentialism in the 20th
century. Its main purpose was to define consciousness as an act of negation (a transcendence of the
given world).
c
Metaphysic: An underlying philosophical or theoretical principle: a belief in luck.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl: (April 8, 1859, Prostějov, Moravia, Austrian Empire – April
ci

26, 1938, Freiburg, Germany) was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology. He
broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that
experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of
psychologism and historicism.

Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was an influential German philosopher.
cii

His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important
philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger remains controversial due to his involvement
with Nazism.
ciii
Phenomenology is a philosophical method developed in the early years of the twentieth century
by Edmund Husserl and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in
Germany. Subsequently, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the
United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's work.
civ
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: March 14, 1908 – May 3, 1961) was a French phenomenological
philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being
closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's
philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding
the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists Merleau-
Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, and politics; however
Merleau-Ponty was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the Twentieth Century to
engage extensively with the sciences, and especially with descriptive psychology.
cv
Ibis

cvi
Emmanuel Levinas (12 January 1906 - 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher and
Talmudic commentator Levinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in 1924,
where he began his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he
went to Freiburg University to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also
met Martin Heidegger. Levinas became one of the very first French intellectuals to draw attention to
Heidegger and Husserl, by translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their
ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s
Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and En Découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et
Heidegger.
cvii
Dietrich von Hildebrand (October 12, 1889 - January 26, 1977) was a German Catholic
philosopher and theologian who was called (informally) by Pope Pius XII "the 20th Century Doctor
of the Church." Pope John Paul II greatly admired the work of von Hildebrand, remarking once to
von Hildebrand's widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicists of the
twentieth century." Pope Benedict XVI has a particular admiration and regard for Dietrich von
Hildebrand, whom he already knew as a young priest in Munich. In fact, as young Fr. Ratzinger, he
even served as an assistant pastor in the church of St. Georg in Munich, which von Hildebrand
frequented in the 1950s and 1960s. It was also in St. Georg that Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand
were married. The degree of Pope Benedict's esteem is expressed in one of his statements about von
Hildebrand, "When the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is
written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our
time."
cviii
Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, referred to in Chinese as Chán. Chán is itself derived
from the Sanskrit Dhyāna, which means "meditation" (see etymology below).Zen emphasizes
experiential Prajñā—particularly as realized in the form of meditation known as zazen—in the
attainment of awakening, often simply called the path of enlightenment. As such, it de-emphasizes
both theoretical knowledge and the study of religious texts in favor of direct, experiential realization
through meditation and dharma practice.
cix
Taoism: refers to a variety of related philosophical and religious traditions and concepts. These
traditions have influenced East Asia for over two thousand years and some have spread to the West.
The word Tao (or Dao, depending on the romanization scheme), means "path" or "way", although in
Chinese folk religion and philosophy it has taken on more abstract meanings. Taoist propriety and
ethics emphasize the Three Jewels of the Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. Taoist thought
generally focuses on nature, men-cosmos correspondence health, longevity, wu wei (action through
inaction), liberty, immortality and spontaneity.
cx
Dasein is a German word famously used by Martin Heidegger in his magnum opus Being and
Time. The word Dasein was used by several philosophers before Heidegger, with the meaning of
"existence" or "presence". It is derived from da-sein, which literally means being-there/here, though
Heidegger was adamant that this was an inappropriate translation of Dasein. In German, Dasein is
the German vernacular term for existence, as in I am pleased with my existence (ich bin mit
meinem Dasein zufrieden).
cxi
The Book of Tea was written by Okakura Kakuzo in the early 20th century. It was first published
in 1906, and has since been republished many times. In the book, Kakuzo introduces the term
Teaism and how Tea has affected nearly every aspect of Japanese culture, thought, and life. The
book is accessibile to Western audiences because Kakuzo was taught at a young age to speak
English; and spoke it all his life, becoming proficient at communicating his thoughts to the Western
Mind. In his book, he discusses such topics as Zen and Taoism, but also the secular aspects of Tea
and Japanese life. The book emphasises how Teaism taught the Japanese many things; most
importantly, simplicity. Kakuzo argues that this tea-induced simplicity affected art and architecture,
and he was a long-time student of the visual arts. He ends the book with a chapter on Tea Masters,
and spends some time talking about Sen no Rikyu and his contribution to the Japanese Tea
Ceremony.
cxii
Okakura Kakuzō (February 14, 1862 – September 2, 1913; Okakura Tenshin) was a Japanese
scholar who contributed to the development of arts in Japan. Outside Japan, he is chiefly
remembered today as the author of The Book of Tea. Okakura was a high-profile urbanite who had
an international sense of self. In the Meiji period he was the first dean of the Tokyo Fine Arts
School (now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). He wrote all of his main
works in English. Okakura researched Japan's traditional art and traveled to Europe, the United
States, China and India. He gave the world an image of Japan as a member of the East, in the face
of a massive onslaught of Western culture.
cxiii
Tomonubu Imamichi born Tokyo, November 19, 1922) is a Japanese philosopher, who studies
Chinese philosophy and has taught in Europe (Paris and Germany) as well as in Japan (he is also
emeritus professor of the University of Palermo). Since 1979 he is president of the Centre
International pour l'Étude Comparée de Philosophie et d'Esthétique and since 1997 of the
International Institute of Philosophy. In 1976 he founded the journal Aesthetics. Imamichi is a
supporter of communication between cultures. He has characterized Western philosophy as an
attempt to achieve a God's eye view (das in-dem-Gott-sein; to be in the being of God) and Eastern
philosophy as an attempt to be in the world (das In-der-Welt-sein). Imamichi sees in both stances
two incomplete and complementary humanisms, and observes that since the publication of The
Book of Tea, some Western philosophers have adopted a more Eastern stance while other Eastern
philosophers have attempted to reach the Absolute or the Eternal. According to him, Heidegger's
concept of the Dasein, formulated in Sein und Zeit, was inspired — although Heidegger remains
silent on this — by Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das In-der-Welt-sein (to be in the being of the
world) expressed in The Book of Tea in an attempt to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy for
Westerners. Imamichi's teacher had offered the German translation of The Book of Tea to Heidegger
in 1919, after having followed lessons with him the year before In 1968, Imamichi was invited by
Hans-Georg Gadamer, a student of Heidegger, for lectures at Heidelberg, but their relationship
became very cool after that Imamichi pointed out that Heidegger had not given the source of his
concept of the Dasein. Imamichi and Gadamer renewed contact four years later during an
international congress.
cxiv
Expressionism was a cultural movement originating in Germany at the start of the 20th-century
as a reaction to positivism and other artistic movements such as naturalism and impressionism. It
sought to express the meaning of "being alive"[2] and emotional experience rather than physical
reality. It is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an emotional effect; it is a subjective art
form. Expressionism is exhibited in many art forms, including painting, literature, theatre, film,
architecture and music. The term often implies emotional angst. In a general sense, painters such as
Matthias Grünewald and El Greco can be called expressionist, though in practice, the term is
applied mainly to 20th century works.
cxv
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based
artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from the title
of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic
Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari. Characteristics of
Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its
changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter,
the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual
visual angles. The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous
movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist
literature. Impressionism also describes art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century
time period.
cxvi
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the
visual artworks and writings of the group members. Surrealist works feature the element of surprise,
unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard
their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being
an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a
revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities of World War I and the
most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s on, the movement spread around
the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music, of many countries and
languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy and social theory.
cxvii
Absurdism is a philosophy stating that the efforts of humanity to find meaning in the universe
ultimately fail (and hence are absurd), because no such meaning exists, at least in relation to the
individual. The word "absurd" in this context does not mean "logically impossible", but rather
"humanly impossible". Basically, Absurdism is the ultimate form of agnosticism in the sense that
man can never truly "know". Absurdism is related to existentialism and nihilism and has its roots in
the 19th century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Absurdism as a belief system was born of
the existentialist movement, when the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus broke from that
philosophical line of thought and published his manuscript The Myth of Sisyphus. The aftermath of
World War II provided the social environment that stimulated absurdist views and allowed for their
popular development, especially in the devastated country of France.

Nihilism is the philosophical position that values do not exist but rather are
cxviii

falsely invented. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential

nihilism which argues that life is without meaning, purpose or intrinsic value.
Moral nihilists assert that morality does not exist, and subsequently there are
no moral values with which to uphold a rule or to logically prefer one action
over another. Nihilism can also take the form of epistemological, metaphysical
or mereological nihilism.The term nihilism is sometimes used synonymously
with anomie to denote the general mood of despair at a perceived
pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon realizing there are no
necessary norms, rules, or laws. Movements such as Futurism and
deconstructionism, among others, have been identified by commentators as
"nihilistic" at various times in various contexts.
cxix
Andreas Huyssen (born 1942) is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University, where he has taught since 1986. He is the founding director of the university's
Center for Comparative Literature and Society and one of the founding editors of the New German
Critique, the leading journal of German studies in the United States. Huyssen is particularly known
for his work on 18th-20th century German literature and culture, international modernism and
postmodernism, Frankfurt School critical theory, cultural memory, historical trauma, urban culture,
and globalization. His work has appeared in translation in Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Chinese,
Japanese, and other languages.
cxx
Omniscient narrator: an ‘all‐knowing’ kind of narrator very commonly found in works of
fiction written as third‐person narratives. The omniscient narrator has a full knowledge of the story's
events and of the motives and unspoken thoughts of the various characters. He or she will also be
capable of describing events happening simultaneously in different places—a capacity not normally
available to the limited point of view of first‐person narratives. See also intrusive narrator.

cxxi
Osamu Dazai (June 19, 1909 – June 13, 1948) was a Japanese author who is considered one of
the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan. He is noted for his ironic and gloomy wit, his
obsession with suicide, and his brilliant fantasy.
cxxii
The Setting Sun is a Japanese novel by Osamu Dazai. It was published in 1947 and is set in
Japan after World War II. Principal characters are the siblings Kazuko and Naoji, and their mother.
Much of the novel is made up of the characters' letters and journals.
cxxiii
Yukio Mishima was the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka,Hiraoka Kimitake. ( January 14, 1925–
November 25, 1970), a Japanese author, poet and playwright, famous for both his highly notable
post-war writings and the circumstances of his ritual suicide by seppuku.
cxxiv
Seppuku is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Seppuku was originally
reserved only for samurai. Part of the samurai honor code, seppuku was used voluntarily by samurai
to die with honor rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, as a form of capital punishment for
samurai who have committed serious offenses, and for reasons that shamed them. Seppuku is
performed by plunging a sword into the abdomen and moving the sword left to right in a slicing
motion.
cxxv
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English, to
refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture,
and politics. Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or
the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is
considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. However, this
is not true in the case of music as many pieces are still being released which are generally
considered avant-garde in popular culture. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-
garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada to the Situationists to
postmodern artists such as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers in the 1980s.
cxxvi
Ibid.

Woman in the Dunes is a novel by Kōbō Abe and a film based on the novel directed by Hiroshi
cxxvii

Teshigahara. The novel was published in 1962, and the film was released in 1964. Kōbō Abe also
wrote the screenplay for the film version. The surreal and, at times, absurd nature of Woman in the
Dunes has been compared to existentialist works such as Sartre's No Exit and Beckett's Happy
Days.
cxxviii
Masuji Ibuse February 15, 1898—July 10, 1993) was a Japanese author. Ibuse was known and
appreciated for most of his career until after the war when he became famous. In 1966 he published
his most well known work: Kuroi Ame ("Black Rain") which won him international acclaim and
several awards including the Noma Prize and The Order of Cultural Merit, the highest honor that
can be bestowed upon a Japanese author. The novel draws its material from the bombing of
Hiroshima with the title referring to the nuclear fallout.
cxxix
Black Rain is a novel by Japanese author Ibuse Masuji. It tells the story of hibakusha (Japanese
atom bomb survivors) struggling with discrimination and social isolation due to radiation poisoning,
as well as accounting for the events in Hiroshima around the time of the bombing. Probably one of
the most well-known of Japanese novels among Western readers Black Rain deals with the suffering
generated by the bombing from a human perspective rather than through a political context.
cxxx
The Noma Prize was established by Shoichi Noma or in his honor. More than one award is
conventionally identified as the Noma Prize. Noma was the former head of Kodansha, the Japanese
publishing and Bookselling Company. Kodansha is Japan's largest publisher of literature and
manga.
cxxxi
Kenzaburō Ōe born January 31, 1935) is a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature.
His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, engage with
political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, social non-conformism and
existentialism. Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined
world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament
today."

cxxxii
A Personal Matter is a novel by Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe The novel is replete with
imagery of death, decay and sex.Written in 1964, the novel is dark, deeply personal, and semi-
autobiographical. It tells the story of Bird, a man who must come to terms with the birth of his
mentally disabled son.
cxxxiii
Shūsaku Endō, March 27, 1923–September 29, 1996) was a renowned 20th century Japanese
author who wrote from the unusual perspective of being both Japanese and Catholic. (The
population of Christians in Japan is less than 1%.).
cxxxiv
Silence is a 1966 novel of historical fiction by Japanese author Shusaku Endo drawn from the
oral histories of Kakure Kirishitan and Hanare Kirishitan communities in Japan. It is the story of a
fictional Jesuit missionary sent to seventeenth century Japan, in the time of Kakure Kirishitan
("Hidden Christians") that followed the defeat of the Shimabara Rebellion. The recipient of the
1966 Tanizaki Prize, it has been called "Endo’s supreme achievement" and "one of the twentieth
century’s finest novels".Written mostly in the form of a letter by its central character, the theme of a
silent God who accompanies a believer in adversity was greatly influenced by the Catholic Endo's
experience of religious discrimination in Japan, racism in France and debilitating tuberculosis.
cxxxv
Henry Graham Greene OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English author,
playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the
modern world. Greene was notable for his ability to combine serious literary acclaim with
widespread popularity. Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Catholic novelist
rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of
much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Heart of the
Matter, The End of the Affair and The Power and the Glory. Later works such as The Quiet
American, Our Man in Havana and The Comedians also show an avid interest in the workings of
international politics and espionage. Greene suffered from bipolar disorder, which had a profound
effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife Vivien he told her that he had "a
character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is
also one's material.

cxxxvi
The Power and the Glory (1940) is a novel by British author Graham Greene. The title is an
allusion to the doxology often added to the end of the Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom,
(and) the power, and the glory, now and forever (or forever and ever), amen." The novel tells the
story of a Roman Catholic priest in the state of Tabasco in Mexico during the 1930s, a time when
the Mexican government, still effectively controlled by Plutarco Elías Calles, strove to suppress the
Catholic Church. The persecution was especially severe in the province of Tabasco, where the anti-
clerical governor Tomás Garrido Canabal had founded and actively encouraged "fascist"
paramilitary groups (called the “Red-Shirts”) and succeeded in closing all the churches in the state;
forcing the priests to marry and give up their gowns, making a hitherto conservative and staid state
a model of revolutionary sterility and oppression.
cxxxvii
Václav Havel (born 5 October 1936 in Prague, the Czech Republic) is a Czech playwright,
essayist, former dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia
(1989–92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He has written over twenty
plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally. He has received the US
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, and the Ambassador of Conscience
Award.
cxxxviii
The Cold War was the continuing state of conflict, tension and competition that existed after
World War II between the Soviet Union and its satellites and the powers of the Western world under
the leadership of the United States from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s.
cxxxix
The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of
its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. It began on January 5, 1968, when reformist
Slovak Alexander Dubček came to power, and continued until August 21, when the Soviet Union
and members of its Warsaw Pact allies invaded the country to halt the reforms.
cxl
Charter 77 was an informal civic initiative in Czechoslovakia from 1977 to 1992, named after
the document Charter 77 from January 1977. Founding members and architects were Václav Havel,
Jan Patočka, Zdeněk Mlynář, Jiří Hájek, and Pavel Kohout. After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, many
of its members played important roles in Czech and Slovak politics.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica
http://www.answers.com/topic/omniscient-narrator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Butler_Yeats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Vision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joris-Karl_Huysmans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Spender
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_and_the_Fury
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_rebours
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism_(arts)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qajar_dynasty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasser-al-Din_Shah
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_period
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Culture_Movement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-romanticism
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/492034/rationalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimazaki_Toson
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Zola
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoya_Shiga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takiji_Kobayashi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denji_Kuroshima
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuriko_Miyamoto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineko_Sata
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Huelsenbeck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican-American_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Tucker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Heywood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(novel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Pirandello
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Proust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djuna_Barnes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobo_Ab%C3%A9
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructivism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Genette
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Husserl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_L%C3%A9vinas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_von_Hildebrand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Tea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okakura_Kakuzo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomonubu_Imamichi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_realism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant-garde
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_in_the_Dunes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masuji_Ibuse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Rain_(novel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noma_Prize
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenzaburo_Oe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Personal_Matter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shusaku_Endo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_(novel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_and_the_Glory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanikosen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Setting_Sun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_77