A Long Anxiety Dream: The Absence and Subversion of Identity in Kazuo Ishiguro's an Artist of the Floating World

Jingxi He

doi:10.54097/ehss.v13i.8214

Authors

Jingxi He

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54097/ehss.v13i.8214

Keywords:

Kazuo Ishiguro; Identification; Universal values.

Abstract

The article will discuss Kazuo Ishiguro's possibilities as an atypical diasporic writer by focusing on his dual international background. Next, through analyzing his early novel “An Artist of The Floating World”, the theme of the absence and subversion of identity can be revealed. By shaping an imagined post-war Japan and using unreliable narratives, Kazuo Ishiguro succeeds in conveying universal anxiety. Finally, we will explore the writer's own anxieties implied behind the context of his personal goal of so-called “universal values”, where the United States plays a role of “the other” that cannot be ignored.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Wang Ning. “Diasporic Literature and Cultural Identity” [J]. Social Science, 2006(11).

Ishiguro Kazuo himself answers a reporter's question about the non-Japanese context of The Remains of the Day: “I realized that the essence I wanted to express was fluid.” seen: [US] The Paris Review, edited by Yang Xiangrong et al. The Paris Review - Interviews with Writers 3. People's Literature Publishing House, 2017.12.

Wayne Booth's famous observation in The Rhetoric of Fiction: “When the narrator defends or acts close to the ideological norm of the work (that is, the implicit ideological norm of the author), I call such a narrator credible; conversely, I call him or her incredible.”

[Japanese] Hashimoto Akiko, The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan, translated by Li Pengcheng, Shanghai: Joint Publishing, 2019, p. 17.

[US] W.J.T.Mitchell, Landscape and Power, translated by Yang Li and Wan Xinqiong, Nanjing: Yilin Press, 2014, p. 1, p. 5.

Liu Xiaofeng, The Heavy Flesh [M]. Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2015: pp. 170-171.

Zhang Lanyu, "Nobel's Will and Kazuo Ishiguro's Ideals", Expository Books, 2017, no. 11, pp. 83-88.