Abstract

In “The Text of Space – the Space of Text” Ai Maeda seeks to determinate what is specific to the spatial experience of the literary text, beginning with a phenomenological analysis of the act of reading, which he further reformulates following the axioms of topology. Meanwhile, he replaces his analyses of this lived space in the literary representation of a concrete spatiality, that of modern urban space. By doing so, his theoretical claim is superimposed on a cultural critic of Japanese modernity. One can thus read Maeda’s spatiality as one of the first response from contemporary Japanese critical thought to Kitarô Nishida’s basho and his followers of the Kyoto school.