Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000Jan Walsh Hokenson
Book Review
Impressive in its thoroughness and clarity, this chronological traversal of Japonisme in France traces the successive interpretations and pervasive influence of Japanese aesthetics on French writers since the mid-19th century. Starting with the Impressionist artists and naturalist writers who fell under the spell of Japanese woodprints, Hokenson (Florida Atlantic Univ.) weaves an absorbing account of the French writers’ discovery of, and apprenticeship in, Japanese forms and vision. Allusive, sensory, affective, expressing the infinite in the finite, Japanese art is shown as transforming traditional Western notions of time and space. The author traces Choice (May 2005) Hokenson (classics, French, comparative literature, and women’s studies, Florida Atlantic Univ.) is dead serious about comedy, and here she traces the history of its criticism and explores the interface between societies and their “construction” of “the comic.” Unlike Umberto Ecco, who uses humor to explore comedy in The Name of the Rose and Misunderstandings, Hokenson prefers to construct a weighty, scholarly, sweeping historical perspective, and from this vantage point she examines critical theorists from Aristotle and Aristophanes to Freud, Bergson, and Elaine Scary. Several chapters, for example, “Twin Modernist Elisions,” engage in modish modernist bashing, but in other chapters Hokenson uncovers what she calls “the butts” of subjectivity and reason. The epilogue is a tour de force, summarizing the last 15 extraordinarily productive years of comic theory. A good complement to V. Ulea’s A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type (2002), Susan Purdie’s Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (1993), M. S. Silk’s Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy (2000), and James McGlew’s Citizens on Stage (2002), this book is eloquent and precise on classical literature. It travels two and a half millennia, over acres of literatures, a trip that those with stamina will undertake and enjoy. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. R. H. Soloman, formerly, University of Alberta, Choice, October 2006 To see a full description of this book, search our online database To read more reviews
--J.P. Cauvin, University of Texas at Austin
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