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• Office Fiction Studies

• Posthuman Studies

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• Poe’s Prehistoric Fiction and Pre/Post-Humanity: Speculation via "Silence"

  Masaomi Kobayashi

  Arizona Quarterly ( Johns Hopkins University Press )  80 ( 4 ) 81 - 104   2024.12 [ Peer Review Accepted ]

  Type of publication: Research paper (scientific journal)

  　View Summary

  The present study brings into sharp focus the prehistoric aspects of “Silence,” the 1838 tale by Edgar Allan Poe. The word “prehistoric” came into general use in the 1860s, and it was not until around the turn of the century that saw the emergence of prehistoric fiction in English. In “Silence,” however, Poe had already presented a form of prehistoric narrative by creating a fictional setting of West Central Africa. The Demon tells the frame narrator what happened when systems of writing had not yet been invented. The tale based predominantly on his story can then be seen as a spoken account of the prehistoric event that had yet to earn the epithet “historic.” As the story evolves, the man in the toga shows themselves standing on the rock—one engraved first with the word “DESOLATION” and then with the word “SILENCE.” Taken together, the abrupt appearance of the ancient Roman and the anonymous appearance of the capital words are highly symbolic of the dawn of protohistory—the threshold between prehistory and history. The man wears a world-weary expression that tells of his detachment from his prehistoric condition, under which words cannot be alone because they can exist in the spoken form alone. At the same time, he looks around and finds himself absolutely alone. This series of movements bespeaks of his commitment to the historic condition, under which words can be alone because they can now exist in the written form also. The tale ends with the passage where the frame narrator refers to “the fine tales in the volumes of the Magi,” suggesting history as an act of telling stories through writing a series of past events, including prehistoric ones. Thus “Silence,” which has been considered cryptic, can be decoded from an entirely historical perspective spanning from prehistory to protohistory to history. Overall, this study casts new light on prehistoric fiction by discovering the tale’s unexplored potential. It is to be noted, however, that while contributing to prehistory studies in close relation to the work of Poe, this study finds itself associated with philosophy studies with special reference to so-called phonocentrism and correlationism, each of which has come under severe and sharp criticism by the French-Continental philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Quentin Meillassoux. Their deconstructive or speculative philosophies serve to reveal what has been unexplored (or at least underexplored) in “Silence,” hence allowing an understanding of how widely open it is to what belongs outside of history and humanity. An attempt is ultimately made to demonstrate that the tale’s potentiality lies in its capacity to generate fresh perspectives not only on prehistory but also on pre-humanity and even on post-humanity.

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• The Speculative Nature of Things: "To Build a Fire" and Its Intellectual Narrative

  Masaomi Kobayashi

  Studies in English Literature ( 日本英文学会 )  ( 66 ) 19 - 35   2025 [ Peer Review Accepted ]

  Type of publication: Research paper (scientific journal)

  　View Summary

  The present essay aims to provide fresh insights into the intellectual narrative of Jack London’s 1908 best-known story, “To Build a Fire.” Given its least anthropocentric aspects, the story is certainly open to more recent movements than naturalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Particularly noteworthy among them is the novel movement of speculative realism, which is arguably most relevant to the speculative turn at the outset of the twenty-first century that directs focus toward things, living and nonliving alike. This intellectual movement furnishes an alternative to a certain humanism and its closest cousin, anthropocentrism. Herein lies why this essay makes reference to the speculative realist philosophers, Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, who pursue their own approaches beyond humanism in relation to critiquing correlationism between mind and matter—i.e. thinking and being—as embodied by Immanuel Kant. With their explorations of speculative reality in mind, an attempt is thus made to uncover the thought-provoking narrative of “To Build a Fire.” The key figure in this attempt is not the main character but the third-person narrator who offers an omniscient point of view. The focus of this project shifts from numbers to objects: from the temperature degrees that transcend a range of typically human conditions to the snow that allows thinking beyond oneself to the tree that exists outside thought and to the fire that cannot be fully accessible to anyone nor anything. Throughout London’s rewriting of the story, these numbers and objects remain as things in their own right: their own realities are and will continue to be subject to speculation. As the universe of things is of intellectual nature, so is the world of London. If his work is constantly susceptible to intellectual movements, “To Build a Fire” is most illustrative of this very susceptibility. It is, after all, more than an early twentieth-century classic of naturalism. It is an ever-evolving narrative of the speculative nature of things.

• The Sciences and Beyond: On Nonhumanity in Moby-Dick

  Masaomi Kobayashi

  The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan ( The American Literature Society of Japan )  22   1 - 18   2024 [ Peer Review Accepted ]

  Type of publication: Research paper (scientific journal)

• What Is the Man of the Crowd? His Prefiguration

  Masaomi Kobayashi

  九州英文学研究 ( 日本英文学会 )  ( 35 ) 1 - 9   2018.01 [ Peer Review Accepted ]

  Type of publication: Research paper (scientific journal)

  　View Summary

  The present study provides an exploration of Poe’s 1840 story, “The Man of the Crowd,” not by relying on the long-held view of the title character as the flâneur—the voyeuristic idler/stroller originally from mid-1830s Paris—but by answering an as-yet unasked question, “What—not who—is the man of the crowd?” This London-set semi-detective story is primarily characterized by its realistic reference to the street crowd as those with different jobs, and its most detailed description of clerks serves as a text within the text. Poe’s special interest in those office workers is thus addressed in close relation to Melville’s New York story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.” Drawing specific parallels between their protagonists reveals the man of the crowd as a literary cousin of Bartleby. The man’s looks, behavior, and sense of locality furnish the key to the question of what he is or what he used to be. Of equal import is that the narrator as an obsessive reader of the crowd overlaps with the dead letter clerk who detects the identity of the sender from an undeliverable letter. Given both the narrator’s attention like an epistolary detective’s and his subject’s action like an ex-dead letter clerk’s, “The Man of the Crowd” can be conceived as an earlier story relevant to the creation of Bartleby—Bartleby not at the law office but at the Dead Letter Office. Through this extension made backward, not forward (which is the usual direction in diversifying Bartleby), Poe’s main characters, including C. Auguste Dupin, are rediscovered as transatlantic and prototypic figures of Bartleby. Overall, an attempt is made to throw fresh light upon office fiction featuring office-worker characters as Bartlebys.

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• Charles Bukowski at Work : Post Office and the literature of Postal Service

  Kobayashi Masaomi

  英文学研究. 支部統合号 = Studies in English literature. 日本英文学会 編 ( 一般財団法人日本英文学会 )  7   299 - 307   2015.01

  Type of publication: Research paper (scientific journal)

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• The Multiverse of Office Fiction: Bartlebys at Work

  Masaomi Kobayashi ( Part: Single Author )

  Palgrave Macmillan  2022.11

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• Professor of the Year

  2014   University of the Ryukyus  

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• Ahabs, or Aspects of the Posthuman

  Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research(C)

  Project Year: 2020.04  -   

  Investigator(s): Masaomi Kobayashi 

  Direct: 1,300,000 (YEN)  Overheads: 390,000 (YEN)  Total: 1,690,000 (YEN)

  　View Summary

  This research project aims at: ・Discovering a variety of posthuman characteristics of Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick. ・Exploring a variety of American fiction and films featuring posthuman characters as Ahabs. ・Offering a variety of possibilities for future studies in posthuman discourse.

• Bartlebys, or Aspects of Office Fiction

  Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research(C)

  Project Year: 2016  -  2020.03 

  Investigator(s): Masaomi Kobayashi 

  Direct: 1,600,000 (YEN)  Overheads: 480,000 (YEN)  Total: 2,080,000 (YEN)

• Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists(B)

  Project Year: 2010  -  2012 

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