Duke UPから毎年発刊されているAmerican Literary Scholarship (2020)の最新号で私の論文と著書が紹介されました。
この雑誌では、各専門ごとの評者が最新のアメリカ文学研究をピックアップして紹介しています。ここで取り上げられるのは名誉なことですので、今年は二つ取り上げてもらって嬉しく思います。
まずはMelvilleの項目では、St. Mary UniversityのJosh Doty氏が私の『白鯨論』を紹介しています。
What more appropriate subject could have been explored this year than loneliness? What more fitting topic for a year of social distancing, HyFlex teaching, virtual conferences, canceled holidays, and Zoom happy hours? Yoshiaki Furui’s “Lonely Individualism in Moby-Dick” (Criticism 62: 599–623) reconsiders Ahab as not merely an individualistic man but more specifically a lonely one. Furui aims to analyze “the loneliness that lurks beneath his public persona of staunch solitude.” Drawing on affect theory and recent studies on emotion in American literature, he coins the term “lonely individualism” to capture “the two valences of being alone”: solitude, “a state of being,” and loneliness, “a negative feeling.” Crucially, Furui puts Ahab’s lonely individualism in context with the networks in which he is “deeply enmeshed.” Although it seems counterintuitive to claim that a character is both a lonely individual and a node in a network of social relations, “networks and loneliness actually stand in a mutually sustaining relationship: loneliness occurs in the human mind when one feels excluded from a network of relations.” Ahab is disconnected not only from the social network aboard the Pequod but also from Moby Dick. His inability to communicate with the whale, “the very object of his obsessive revenge,” leaves him adrift. (41-42)
次に、International Scholarshipの項目では、神戸市外国語大学の難波江仁美先生が、2019年に出版された単著について紹介してくださっています。
Scholarship on the 19th century is dense and rich, and we are once more blessed with thought-provoking publications. Young scholar Yoshiaki Furui’s first book, Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Alabama, 2019), won both the 5th American Literature Society of Japan Book Prize and the 25th Shimizu Hiroshi Award of the Japanese Association for American Studies. It seemed almost to be fate that the book appeared just before the pandemic forced people to stay home in solitude and resort to social networking in a quest for communication. Furui persuasively historicizes 19th-century American literature with exhaustive archival research and documentation and attaches value to “solitude” as a posi- tive, open state of being. To forget “loneliness” (anxiety of being alone), people have always developed communication technologies, such as the letter, telegraph, and telephone, and those, Furui argues, are in fact the very media that pave the way for the formation of the solitude that is a prerequisite for creative subjectivity. Thoreau’s solitude, for example, is only realizable because of the progression of modern technology of the time, and thus, though seemingly contradictory, his solitary life is closely related to his network of connections in society. Other chapters discuss Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Henry James. (427-28)
