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British Romanticism in Asia pp 361–383Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

“Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!”: Ōe Kenzaburō and William Blake on Bodies, Biopolitics, and the Imagination

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Part of the book series: Asia-Pacific and Literature in English ((APLE))

Abstract

Ōe Kenzaburō’s Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! describes the narrator’s engagement with the poetry of Blake and growing relation with Eeyore/Hikari, his brain-damaged son. As these at first disparate narratives become entwined with each other, they bring into focus three scenes, elaborated across the length of the book, that represent the transition from unsustainable innocence to intolerable experience. Mapping the structures within which life is enclosed is for Ōe and Blake a necessary prelude to their attempt to turn biopolitics on its head by reversing its norms—from the agon between zoe and bios to a life indivisible from the multiple forms in which it is realised. An analogous dynamic is evident in the narrator’s engagement with Blake and Romanticism, in which influence is paradoxically realised as difference.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Peter Otto

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  1. Peter Otto
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Correspondence to Peter Otto .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan

    Alex Watson

  2. Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

    Laurence Williams

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Otto, P. (2019). “Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!”: Ōe Kenzaburō and William Blake on Bodies, Biopolitics, and the Imagination. In: Watson, A., Williams, L. (eds) British Romanticism in Asia. Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3001-8_15

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