Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyses a series of 19 criticisms by Abe Kazushige, which appeared after 9:11. Their narrative experiments problematize the critic's quest for finding a voice after trauma through infinitely delaying speaking about the tragedy and, ultimately, not speaking about it all.

Paper long abstract:

Few people outside of Japan know that multiple award-winning fiction writer Abe Kazushige is also a prolific film critic. At the same time, research has not paid any attention to the author's criticisms at all. This presentation closes this gap by analysing 19 film criticisms published serially from 2002-2004 in the wake of 9:11. Instead of being an orthodox analysis of films, the series calls itself an 'experiment in narrating'. The presentation examines how the criticisms incorporate characteristic narrative techniques from the author's fiction in order to problematize linguistic expression after the trauma of 9:11 as a global watershed. By invoking the figure of a first person unreliable narrator and by using repetition, the series delays its own plot, which is to critique current films. Instead, an undecided subject 'Abe Kazushige' tells us about his listlessness and questions the relevance of film criticism at all. In doing so, the presentation argues that, rather than actually finding a voice, the series makes a problem of the quest for it by delaying speaking about the tragedy and, ultimately, not speaking about it all.

The presentation locates the criticisms' formal experiments within the literary theory of French theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes rejects limiting the language of criticism to one genre. This speaks to how the series' formal complications destabilize the boundary between criticism and literature and perform a general experimental 'writing', which Barthes calls écriture. Against this backdrop, the presentation suggests to move beyond restrictions of genre in literary scholarship generally, which tends to treat the non-fictional production of Japanese authors as secondary. Including an author's criticisms into an analysis of her/his fiction, and the other way round, will allow for a better understanding of either side and of her/his oeuvre in total.