On Politics and Literature: Two Lectures

Japanese writer and Nobel laureate Kenzaburô Ôe delivered the first in a series of lectures established at the Center for Japanese Studies to honor political theorist Masao Maruyama. In his Maruyama Lecture, The Language of Masao Maruyama, he focuses on the problem of political responsibility in the modern world, taking Maruyama’s major work as his point of departure. In a second (unrelated) lecture, From the Beginning to the Present, and Facing the End: The Case of One Japanese Writer, Kenzaburô Ôe offers an account of his own development as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction.