Since Shmuel Eisenstadt published his ground-breaking concept of multiple modernities, there have been various scholarly attempts to free the term modernity from its narrow Eurocentric origins. In line with this, the essays on literature, art and film by Japanese and European scholars in this volume explore various aspects of modernity and its special form of modernism as a general meta-cultural and meta-national concept of social and cultural change. They thus provide a new and nuanced view of the scope of modernity and its specificities in America and Japan. The prefix 'dark' in the title alludes to the insight that these social and cultural transformations do and did not necessarily go along with solely positive effects - as particularly the name-giving Western optimistic version of modernity and modernism wanted to have it.

Following the concept of multiple modernities, the contributors to the volume view modernity as a meta-cultural and meta-national concept of social and cultural change. Their essays on art and literature provide a new and nuanced view of the scope of modernity and its specificities in Japan and the West from the nineteenth century to the present.

Introduction

Yoichiro Miyamoto (Open University of Japan)
Kinds of Noir: Transnational Realism in Postwar America, Japan and Europe

Hans-Peter Rodenberg (University of Hamburg)
The Dark City of Modernity: From “The Killers” to the City noir

Eisuke Kawada (Kanazawa University)
The Stylistic Aesthetic of Disfiguration: The Style of Modernity in Ernest Hemingway’s “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro”

Astrid Böger (University of Hamburg)
Strange Revelations: Re-encountering Diane Arbus’s Photographic Work

Tamara Radak (University of Vienna)
“Maybe the war will be over”: Alternative Futures and Equivocal Closure in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms)

Kodai Abe (University of Tsukuba)
Reading Woolfe Against Trauma: Shell Shock and Gender in Mrs. Dalloway

Bunei Kohara (Komatsu University)
Interopticality and the Atomic Phantom: Jaws, Godzilla, and America’s Legacy of War

Hans-Peter Rodenberg (University of Hamburg)
The Terrible Modernity of War: A Bricolage of Artistic Responses in Japan and America

Yoichiro Miyamoto is a Specially Appointed Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the Open University Japan and Professor emeritus at the University of Tsukuba.
Hans-Peter Rodenberg is a Professor emeritus of Media and Communication and American Cultural Studies at the University of Hamburg.DE