Abstract. In the first half of the twentieth century, when Japanese and Arabic poets began writing free-verse poetry, many terms were proposed as labels for the new form. In addition to the calques on "free verse, " neologisms were created to name the new poetry. What is striking is that, in these two quite different literary spheres, a number of the proposed neologisms were the same: for example, in both Japanese and Arabic the terms prose poetry, modern poetry, and colloquial poetry were proposed (among others) as alternatives to the label free poetry. This essay provides an annotated list of the neologisms in Japanese and Arabic, with a list of English terms for comparison; and by referring to the contemporary Japanese and Arabic criticism on the topic of poetic innovation, this essay attempts to explain the similarity between the Japanese and Arabic neologisms. In short, the Japanese and Arabophone arguments in favour of adapting the free-verse form were based on similar premises regarding modernity, freedom, and a vision of literary history that was rooted in an evolutionary theory of genre development.

This chapter returns to one of the compilers of Shintaishi shō, Inoue Tetsujiro, who bemusedly acknowledged, late in the second decade of the twentieth century, that the shintaishi had all but disappeared from Japanese poetry. He seems to have been unaware of the literary-critical wrangling that had greeted or decried—and, earlier, had called for or hoped to prevent—the creation of meter-free poetry in Japanese. The chapter then looks at the enormous expansion that had taken place in Japanese poets' familiarity with poetries abroad, especially English, French, and German. It assesses Inoue's thought that Japanese poets of the time had forgotten their own recent history—or, to inflect the matter differently, had forgotten him. By looking at Inoue's reflections, the chapter offers us an eyewitness view, biased as it was, of the episodes that had so rapidly transformed Japanese poetry—a history in which he himself had played a crucial role.

No abstract

Among scholars of Japanese poetry there is disagreement as to who the historically important Japanese prose poets are, as well as disagreement over whether prose poetry in Japan is an exclusively modern phenomenon or is one that can be traced back very nearly to the beginnings of Japanese literature. On encountering the above statement, some readers will react dismissively#x2014;dissensus is an inevitable feature of academic discourse, such readers might say. But this chapter is going to claim that there are reasons for the dispute over Japanese prose poetry: the history of the concept of prose poetry in Japanese has made competing theories inevitable—or, if that is too strong a claim, then at least it made dissensus highly likely. An examination of the disparate paths followed by Japanese critical discourse about prose poetry, on the one hand, and the composition of prose poems in Japanese, on the other hand, will go far toward explaining why there have been sharply divergent views on fundamentals at virtually every turn.

Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this article analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning that appear in two novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Zapiski iz podpol'ya (Notes from Underground, 1864) and Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro (1914). The confession of the underground man, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel, includes an argument against the Chernyshevskian doctrine of rational egoism. The underground man's argument may, as this article shows, be analyzed using logical truth tables to demonstrate that, however thorough the underground man's argument may appear, it does not consider the counterexample of selfless altruism. This omission prepares the way for the underground man's rejection of Liza at the climax of the second part of the novel. Sōseki's novel, too, contains a confession, namely Sensei's testament, in which Sensei relates how he arrived at his belief that humanity is fundamentally selfish. Sensei's style of reasoning is primarily inductive, in contrast with that of other characters in Sōseki's novel, and the present article argues that Sensei's style of reasoning is a primary cause of his suicide. In each novel, then, there is a sustained consideration of how and to what extent a style of reasoning is bound up with a character's fate.