A Fictional Commons

“Michael K. Bourdaghs's A Fictional Commons provides a strikingly new approach to thinking about the fiction and theories of Natsume Soseki, as well as for thinking how literature as a practice gestures to something beyond the modern regime of private property. Literature, Bourdaghs demonstrates, is one of the sites where we imagine the return in a higher dimension of the commons, the gift, and primitive communism.” — Karatani Kojin, author of Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy

“Both erudite and innovative, A Fictional Commons brilliantly demonstrates how Natsume Soseki, through his fiction and criticism, explored literature as a domain for imagining the alternatives to modern private property regime and the related conceptualization of modern personhood. It is a major contribution to Soseki studies and modern Japanese literary studies. It also joins broader debates over the value of literature in the twenty-first century—how it may inspire creative modes of sharing that traverses national, regional, and other boundaries dividing our troubled present.” — Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities, Harvard University