Week 4 (Lecture) - Atomic Bomb Literature

Question 1

What were the three reactions to the postwar in Japan and which one did atomic bomb literature deal with and how?

Answer 1

Celebration, nostalgia, and mourning (atomic bomb literature).

Writers were looking back and the war was regarded as a disaster, sense that Japanese were real victims of war. Also sense of responsibility to record thoughts in the immediate aftermath of the bomb. Looking for scraps of paper, etc. Sense of immediacy.

Question 2

What are the issues arising out of atomic bomb literature?

Answer 2

• ‘crisis of representation’
• ‘representing the unrepresentable’
• responsibility/compulsion to describe something like this but do not have the language to do it
• question of how best to represent Hiroshima/Nagasaki in literature? Experimental poetry? Stream of consciousness?
• mourning and impossibility of mourning

Question 3

What issues arise out of the responsibility of testifying to Hiroshima/Nagasaki?

Answer 3

• importance of testimony
• moral responsibility to teach Hiroshima/Nagasaki - if so, what is the best approach?
• imagining the future
• mourning and impossibility of mourning - melancholia is the failure of the work of mourning