保田與重郎覚え書 : 文学的出発時の一断面

When YASUDA Yojuro entered into literary world with the publishment of a literary coterie magazine, Cogito, he was concerned with literary criticism, theory of writing and its practice. It was his belief that he should cultivate his literary mind in these three fields at the same time. After publishing Nihon Roman Ha (so-called Japanese Romanticism), however, he devoted himself only to criticism and established himself asacritic. The theme of this paper is, then, how the three fields were related to each other when he entered into literary world, and why the theory and the practice of writing came to a cessation. YASUDA\u27s criterion of literary criticism had something to do with the enjoyment of literary qualities, that is, identity of aesthetics. It was an antithesis to the Marxism theory of literature in which people criticized literary works according to the external criterion, not the internal one. He wrote a few novels practising his own theory, but they were not more than just a practice in writing. However, it was these novels, which were far from what is called a novel, that his own theory of writing required, and it was his motif to reform the concept of novels at the time by applying theories of German Romanticism; he considered German Romanticism the origin of notions of art and criticism. The reason that he stopped working on the theory of writing and its practice was simply because his theory was not powerful enough to produce novels. His theory was constructed logically only by his passion for an innovation. When he could not find a motif and theme for his novels, his literary energies which were directed to the theory, writing and criticism at the beginning were concentrated exclusively on the field of criticism