Left: illustration of a vacuum pump, in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s 1868 textbook Illustrations of the Investigation of Natural Laws (Kyūri zukai). Right: illustration of colonial Calcutta, in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s 1869 textbook All the Countries of the World (Sekai kunizukushi).
This dissertation reevaluates major threads of intellectual and cultural activity of Meiji Japan (1868-1912) as part of a project of “critical enlightenment,” conceived in response to the imminent threat of Euro-American imperialism. Building on recent scholarship that eschews narratives of Japan’s putative modernization and Westernization, I excavate indeterminacies latent in intellectual and creative activity in the Meiji period, and demonstrate the transformational nature of this activity not only within Japan, but also with respect to the global discourse of Enlightenment in which it self-situated. The pedagogical structure of critical enlightenment underscored the importance of communicative media and infrastructures, and threw into question the adequacy of the Japanese
language itself as a basis both for translation as well as for spoken and written discourse. This dissertation adds two methodological approaches largely absent from the body of scholarship on linguistic thought in the Meiji period: (1) an emphasis on the media environment that conditions linguistic production and thought, and (2) a focus on disciplinarity, the shifting organization of knowledge, classed as novel in both substance and structure. In particular, I clarify how practices and rhetorical conceptions of science and literature outline overlapping domains of shared human capacity for experiencing and knowing that linked to socio-political organization.