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Bilingual Dream and Melancholy

NISHI Masahiko December 5, 2014 Jinbun Shoin, 277p.

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NISHI Masahiko December 5, 2014 Bilingual Dream and Melancholy,Jinbun Shoin, 277p. ISBN-10: 4409160966 ISBN-13: 978-4409160961 2,800 yen+tax [amazon][kinokuniya]

■Contents

The word of "bilingual" may sound actually in Japan so hopeful and optimistic. Bilingualism seems to be one of the conditions of success in life for everybody. And more and more attentions, on the other hand, are paid to bilingual or multilingual poets and novelists, who dare write not naturally, that is, in their own mother tongue but in a later acquired language.
My initial question was how about the situation of bilinguals produced in the history of modernization in Imperial Japan and its peripheries and how they were depicted in the Japanophone literature and Japanese American literature.
Starting from Collection of the Epics of the Gods (1923) I dealt in the end with John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957). My purpose was to scrutinize the pains and agonies of being "bilingual", reading one after another writings which are based on the experiences of the members of linguistic minorities, in Hokkaido annexed by Japan, in colonial Taiwan, in colonial Korea, in minority settlements scattered over Japanese mainland and in some states of the US, densely inhabited by Japanese immigrants and their descendants.
In this way, I tried to emphasize on the necessity of a new style of comparative literature which could catch up with the global-sized diaspora and the birth of World Literature.

■Table of Contents

1 Bilingual Daydream and Literary Expressions of an Ainu Lady
2 Multilingual Situation of Colonial Taiwan and Monolingalism of the Novel? from Sato Haruo to Li Hik-jiok
3 Idealistic Language Policy of Yuasa Katsue
4 Korean and Japanese Bilinguals in the Novels of Nakanishi Inosuke and Kim Seok-beom
5 Zainichi Korean Novelists and the Issue of "Mother Tongue": Focusing on Lee Hueson
6 What Is "the Second Generation Literature"?: Zainichi Korean Literature and Nikkei American Literature






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