On Politics and Literature, Two Lectures by Kenzaburo Oe

Kenzaburo Oe, Japan's second Nobel Laureate in Literature, with his insistence on engaging the reader in a provocative dialogue on the human condition, is one of the most impassioned voices of conscience countering the country's minimalist cultural tradition that puts imagery and aesthetics of silence above social and political concerns. Filtering the intellectual and cultural legacy of the Western world, his works probe the vital connection between the socio-political and the personal in a style imbued with the imaginative power of the oral tradition of his birthplace and bursting with the explosive energies of Bakhtinian grotesque realism. His aberrant images, reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard's definition of imagination, stud complex multi-layered narratives, in which the diverse voices of his characters resonate with one another within and between reinvented texts. Both conceptually and stylistically, Oe has delivered modern Japanese literature out of its long isolation and into the heart of world literature.