This dissertation explores how emerging understandings of science and religion impacted the formation of the modern field of literature in Japan. I argue that many modern Japanese writers “enchanted” literature, giving it a metaphysical value that they thought might stand firm in the face of modernity’s “disenchantment of the world,” to use the famous phrase of Max Weber. To do so, writers leveraged new anti-materialistic, pantheistic, and mystical ontologies that emerged around the globe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in philosophy, theology, and new fields of knowledge like religious studies. These worldviews were appealing alternatives to “religion,” which many Japanese intellectuals understood mainly as orthodox forms of Christianity and Buddhism, and which had been widely rejected by the early twentieth century under the influence of new scientific and historical hermeneutics. At the same time though, influential voices in the emerging critical discourse of Japanese literature were skeptical of purely materialistic accounts of reality and especially of art, turning instead to new notions of the spirit, the ideal, and the transcendental. I argue that the foundations of literary value and of the social position of the author in modern Japan are rooted in these new ideas about what might be experienced and represented outside the bounds of both scientific materialism and traditional religious dogma. The texts I examine consist of literary and aesthetic treatises, debates on philosophical and theological issues, and biographical and fictional works, all of which were pivotal to the theorization of Japanese literature and the artist, ranging from early efforts in the 1890s and extending through the tumultuous first half of the 20th century. The first chapter of my dissertation explores how canonical writers like Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894), Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) wove emerging theories of religion and reality into their view of the capacity of poetry and fiction in the 1890s and 1900s. I show how their idea of the genius, or, drawing from Thomas Carlyle, of the “hero,” ascribed to the modern author the same capacity to perceive beyond the five senses as that identified in the prophets of the world religions. This understanding was based on a shared premise that religious texts were products not of divine revelation, but of a universal, non-empirical type of experience of the “inner heart,” the “ideal,” or the “World-soul,” defined as the essence of the world’s religions yet untethered to any one religious faith and fully accessible to the modern genius. The second chapter argues that similar ideas penetrated notions of the modern novel and the author through the early 1910s. A new generation of young writers who launched their careers after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, including Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961) and Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976), imagined Japanese artists as equal members of a global community of artists by identifying universal truths and beauty as the object of all art, religion, and science. In justifying the universal nature of art, writers argued that figures from Tolstoy to Rodin, and from Jesus to the Buddha, were all engaged in the same creative process. I show that these views provided a basis for Japanese authors to claim equality with their Western counterparts, just as it allowed prominent Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971) to claim equality with male writers, since both nationality and gender were seen as unrelated to one’s ability to experience and represent the non-material aspects of reality. Similar views of art were employed to imagine the sociopolitical role of the writer within Japan. The third chapter begins with analysis of two leftist intellectuals, Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911) and Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923), who were both eventually killed for their political activity. Both argued that myths, defined by them as both as religious texts and the great works of modern artists, could lead to individual enlightenment, bringing moral clarity for Kōtoku and a new means of experiencing reality for Ōsugi, thus creating the type of subject that could spark political change. Aristocrats Yanagi and Mushanokōji were unsympathetic with the left, but I argue that these two writers similarly attempted to repurpose religious texts to affect social change. By following in the footsteps of the mystics and prophets of the past, while also never directly addressing the existence of the supernatural, they believed that they could create change while also avoiding the pitfalls of religion. I argue that each of these writers drew from religious traditions in their definition of the author’s continuing social and political legitimacy in the midst of the rapid expansion of both leftist movements and of Japanese imperial power in the 1910s and ‘20s. In the fourth chapter, I argue that across his career, writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) balanced a critique of traditional religion with an interest in non-religious forms of spiritual experience. Akutagawa cast the Christian Church as a colonial organization concerned with accumulating power, yet at the same time drew on the transnational discourse connecting the supernatural to both psychological disorder and to the colonial idea of “primitivity” in order to create ambiguous portrayals of inexplicable experiences and phenomena. Akutagawa also identifies the possibility for “poetic” literature to open the door to a type of extraordinary experience described almost exclusively in religious language, which I argue also influenced his own experiments with aphoristic writing. This chapter provides a new understanding of this canonical author’s views of religious experience and of literature, while also positioning his work as one part of a discursive current with deep roots in modern Japan and across the globe. In the epilogue, I consider the afterlife of these currents in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. I first discuss how the metaphysical and aesthetic positions analyzed in previous chapters laid the groundwork for some authors to shift toward support for the Japanese state’s embrace of authoritarianism and colonialism. However, even if the emphasis on intuitive knowledge and the deeds of heroic individuals within these forms of knowledge led some towards right-wing politics, the fictional and critical texts of Ishikawa Jun (1899–1987) written in this period provide an excellent example of an alternative path. In Ishikawa’s work, traditional Buddhism and Christianity are objects of incessant yearning, representing an absolute moral and conceptual authority that no longer exists in the grimy wartime and postwar reality. But I argue that parallel to his critique of absolutism, Ishikawa’s characters continue to yearn for something more, and Ishikawa himself identifies a potential for salvation within literature. Ishikawa’s work shows that the idea of an enchanted potentiality within writing continued to undergird literary discourse in Japan even in the face of the massive sociopolitical upheaval of WWII.

Mori Ōgai’s (1862-1922) 1909 translation and the subsequent theater production of Henrik Ibsen’s 1896 play John Gabriel Borkman was in many ways instrumental in the formation of Japanese Meiji-era shingeki theater. Through his career as a translator, Ōgai’s translation approach shifted from one of decreasingly relying on domestication techniques to staying more faithful to the source text through use of foreignization techniques and arguably towards what has been identified by Eugene Nida and Jin Di as dynamical equivalence or equivalent effect, respectively, in drama translation. In this project, Ōgai’s translation of John Gabriel Borkman is examined using a set of categories peculiar to drama translation, as proposed by Chinese scholars Xu and Cui (2011), again based on the theories of Nida and Di. The categories are intelligibility, brevity, characterization and actability. The results from the analysis are used to do a qualitative analysis of Ōgai’s approach to drama translation. Results from the study indicate that Ōgai put large emphasis on the intelligibility of the play, and perhaps over the aspects of brevity, characterization and actability. However, wherever the brevity aspect seems not to be in violation of any of the other aspects, Ōgai seems to have tried to adhere as close as possible to the source texts in terms of speaking length.

This thesis is an examination of contemporary artist Mariko Mori's use of fashion in her work from 1993 to 2001. Contained within her sartorial phrasing is an involved relationship with the body, female and Japanese, as it exists within technological modernity. Tumult characterizes Mori's body as she images it early on in her career. This highly alienating space in which she positions herself gradually transitions to a space of respite for the performative body of another actor by 2001's Wave UFO. Wave UFO creates a mediated space for healing the modern body plagued with isolation through transcendence provided by technological means. Minimalist fashion, as a kind of plastic mechanization of corporeal experience, helps to accomplish this healing. Mori's Wave UFO attendant costumes present minimalist fashion as a location for reconciling spiritual identity in a postmodern age. The flat-panel costumes have the effect of disfiguring the bodies of the attendants into amorphous plasticized shells (much like the backdrop of the Wave UFO) and mechanizing the movements of the wearer. The sleek technological sensibility of the costumes, in conjunction with the stark sterility of the immersive Wave UFO interior, are the culminating expression of the ambivalent liminality Mori's body takes from 1993-1999. This is a body that floats between absence and presence, self and other. This thesis begins with a survey of Mori's 1990s work, including her 1994 self-portrait series that launched the artist into international recognition. The 1993-94 self-portraits present a playful mimicry and a self-aware exploration of regional dress as it is found on the streets of Tokyo. By the end of the decade the play shifts to minimalist self-denial that achieves a transcendence of the imaged body once grounded in the urban self-portraits. After exploring necessary and appropriate contexts of Japanese fashion and other cultural contexts, the thesis culminates in an extended analysis of Mori's 2001 Wave UFO installation. Mori's suggestion that technology can achieve transcendence of the body furthers the theorization that minimalist fashion overcomes the physical and ideological boundaries of human existence in a modern world.

No description available.

This thesis considers how Mori Ōgai’s “Maihime” (1890) and Su Manshu’s “Suizanji” (1916) conform and differ from Edgar Allen Poe’s theory of the short story. It then considers Ōgai’s and Su’s reading of the short stories and East Asian short fiction as well as Ōgai’s definition of the short story to consider why these works of short fiction differ from Poe’s definition, concluding that they are hybrid works, which seek to combine the short story and East Asian short fiction.

This thesis investigates the mechanisms behind natural silk spinning by integrating rheology, spectroscopy and small angle scattering to better understand this process and to guide our efforts towards mimicking Nature’s ways of producing high performance fibres. As a result of natural selection, arthropods such as spiders and moths have evolved the ability to excrete silk proteins in a highly controlled manner. Spun from liquid feedstocks, silk fibres are used ex vivo to build structures with mechanical properties currently unmatched by industrial filaments. As yet, relatively little attention has been directed to the investigation of spinning under biologically relevant conditions. To better understand how and why silk is spun, this thesis bridges the gap between liquid silk flow properties and structure development. To directly connect the two, I have developed and deployed novel experimental platforms that combine infrared spectroscopy and small angle scattering with rheology. This approach has clarified long-standing ambiguities on the structural root of silk’s apparently complex flow properties. Small angle scattering revealed the length scales involved in the flow induced solidification under a range of spinning conditions. Mo reover, infrared spectroscopy offered a unique perspective into silk’s formation process immediately after excretion. In a similar manner to the post-extrusion tuning of the properties of partly solidified spider silk filaments, this thesis has revealed that silkworm silk fibres are far from completely formed once excreted. One might describe the filaments of mulberry silkworm as seeded molten polymers that form its hydrogen bonding network and crystallises slowly on site. Consequently, it enlightens that post-spinning conditions are equally paramount for silkworm silk, giving an explanation for the relatively poorer mechanical properties. The comparison of silks from a range of species, allowed this hypothesis to be extended to wild silkworm silk. My insights into spinning had the fortuitous repercussion of facilitating silk fibre solubilisation leading to the development of better artificial silk feedstocks flowing like native silks. With these findings, I believe we are now in an improved position to conceive artificial fibres with properties rivalling those of Nature.

Nosema bombycis est un parasite obligatoire intracellulaire et eukaryoitique microsporidia apparenté aux champignons. Cette microsporidie est l'agent responsable de la pébrine, maladie du ver à soie Bombyx mori qui inflige de sévères pertes économiques à la sériciculture mondiale. Nous avons étudié l'interactions N. bombycis-B. mori in vivo : l'infestation par N. bombycis démarre au niveau de l'épithélium intestinal antérieur, puis s'étend aux muscles et trachées adjacents. Les tissus plus distants sont ensuite infectés. Cependant, les réponses immune mélanisation et phagocytose, l'hémolymphe et les hémocytes sont les vecteurs de la dissémination de N. bombycis dans son hôte. Nous avons développé une approche protéomique pour identifier des protéines de tube polaire (PTP). Trois PTPs ont été caracterisés par immunocytochimie MET et MS/MS. Des motifs de séquence peptidique ont pu en être déduits par les programmes Peaks Online et DeNovoX, puis évalués par algorithmes Mascot et Sequest

The essay is concerned with education in the first twenty years of the Meiji era. At first there is a short account on situation of the education and the main govermental proposals concerning it. The main part of the essay is dealing with the discussion among Meiji era intellectuals about the goals of the education and means to achieve them. Bacause of the importance of the western influence the essay concentrates on the intellectuls with western experience gathered in a group called Meirokusha.

No description available.

La soie est un biopolymère synthétisé par certains arthropodes. Cette fibre est constituée de protéines arrangées en une microstructure semi-cristalline et possède d'intéressantes propriétés mécaniques. L'axe principal de ce travail de thèse concerne la compréhension du processus de formation de la fibre de soie. La soie de Bombyx mori a été choisi comme modèle. Sa protéine, nommée Fibroïne, a été utilisée pour produire une fibre dans une cellule microfluidique construite pour mimer l'appareil de filage du ver à soie. Le processus de formation de la soie a été suivi par des techniques de diffusion des rayons X (SAXS et WAXS) et par spectroscopie Raman. Elle débute par une étape d'agrégation. La taille des agrégats est de l'ordre de 100 nm. Dans ces particules, la Fibroïne est sous une forme compactée. Cette agrégation est suivie d'une phase de compaction des agrégats. Plus tard, à une échelle de temps de quelques heures, la Fibroïne subit une transition conformationnelle depuis une structure principalement amorphe (Silk I) vers la structure caractéristique de la soie naturelle (Silk II). Ce processus est proposé comme un modèle de la formation de la fibre de soie in vivo. Le second axe de ce travail est orienté vers la connaissance des propriétés physiques de la soie naturelle de B. mori. Sa résistance aux hautes températures est étudiée d'un point de vue structural, moléculaire et mécanique. L'effet des hautes pressions sur la structure de la fibre de soie est aussi présentée.