Secondary Art and the Two-Story House: Kuwabara Takeo and the Comparative Imagination in Midcentury Japan, 1935-1947

Bronson, Adam

doi:10.1017/s1479244320000013

Secondary Art and the Two-Story House: Kuwabara Takeo and the Comparative Imagination in Midcentury Japan, 1935-1947

Bronson, Adam

Authors

Dr Adam Bronson adam.p.bronson@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Abstract

This article focuses on the life and ideas of Kuwabara Takeo, a cultural critic and scholar of French literature who became renowned for his 1946 critique of haiku as a “secondary art” in comparison with the novel. By reconstructing Kuwabara’s intellectual trajectory from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, I show how this famous essay was in part an effort to respond to Karl Löwith’s famous critique of Japanese intellectuals. Löwith argued Japanese intellectuals were insufficiently critical towards their own culture, due to the way that they compartmentalized practices and ideas associated with either Japanese culture or Western civilization. Kuwabara resisted such tendencies through the practice of cross-cultural comparison. His work gained encouragement from and responded to Löwith’s critique in a way that illuminates the role comparisons played in the intellectual culture of mid-twentieth century Japan.

Citation

Bronson, A. (2021). Secondary Art and the Two-Story House: Kuwabara Takeo and the Comparative Imagination in Midcentury Japan, 1935-1947. Modern Intellectual History, 18(2), 451-473. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244320000013

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Dec 18, 2019
Online Publication Date	Feb 19, 2020
Publication Date	2021-06
Deposit Date	Dec 20, 2019
Publicly Available Date	Jan 16, 2020
Journal	Modern Intellectual History
Print ISSN	1479-2443
Electronic ISSN	1479-2451
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	18
Issue	2
Pages	451-473
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244320000013

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article has been published in a revised form in Modern intellectual history. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244320000013. This version is published under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND. No commercial re-distribution or re-use allowed. Derivative works cannot be distributed. © Cambridge University Press.