Nagano Yoshihiro

<p lang="en"> Abstract: The traumatic center of Richard Powers's Prisoner's Dilemma lies in the main character's exposure to radiation from America's first nuclear bomb detonation at the Trinity test site. This experience motivates Eddie Hobson to generate a fantastic World War II narrative that includes a radically irrational act of releasing internal enemy aliens—Americans of Japanese ancestry—from internment camps. This article analyzes a reversal of Cold War game theory, genealogical displacement as a challenge to wartime racial ideology, minority draft resisters' critique of civil liberties, and contradictions in global peace promotion through all-powerful weapons. Also, the concept of symbolic survivors sheds lights on enigmas surrounding Eddie Hobson. Overall, drawing insights from Japanese American history and literature, this study explores the possibility of a counternarrative against wartime narratives of suspicion and mistrust.</p>

This study investigates David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) with special emphasis on the concepts and practices of the "care of the self," an art of caring for oneself in the hyper-competitive culture of contemporary America. Wallace's America aggressively propels the characters toward self-actualization and social success, and yet it tragically depresses those who fail to achieve their goals. The characters are free to shape their own lives, make the best of opportunities, and maximize their happiness, but, struggling toward higher, almost impossible goals, they become distraught with anxiety, and often crushed by the feelings of failure and powerlessness. The novel revolves around the Enfield Tennis Academy in Boston, a competitive, elite academy whose students are obsessed with achievement, with aspiration to climb the ladder of a tennis-ranking system. This study first examines how these students grapple with a gnawing sense of failure and powerlessness, as they endeavor to succeed in that highly competitive, athletic system. This paper will explore their attempts at the care of the self by way of philosophical and psychological investigations into the self, with special emphasis on the concepts and practices of the Tennis Academy's philosophy, ones that lead individuals to ethical self-formation. This analysis also involves another group of characters-troubled adults who have lost control over their lives and have fallen into powerlessness. These characters are residents of a halfway house that Wallace locates near the elite Tennis Academy. This study also probes into the relationship between powerlessness and the biological origin of morality in order to suggest an example of the art of survival, one that could guide individuals through intensely distressing cultural forces at work within Wallace's America.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, emergent ideas of the nation are shaped during and immediately after the Second World War, when national formation becomes inseparable from the development of rocketry. The advent of this new technology, which disregards national borders, leads characters to disavow belief in the state and the city as protective institutions. In this context, the driving force behind national formation is what Pynchon calls “the System.” This study, relying on such concepts as abstract systems, risk, and trust, examines how Pynchon’s characters establish relations in a society engaged with an agglomeration of abstract systems that constitute the System. Special emphasis will be placed on the space of the city where the complex relation between the individual and the nation in the risk environment becomes clearly observable.