@article{oai:nichibun.repo.nii.ac.jp:00000231,
 author = {KARLSSON, Mats},
 journal = {Nichibunken Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies},
 month = {Jan},
 note = {Kurahara Korehito became the leading Marxist theoretician during the heyday of the Japanese proletarian art movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Emerging as the “winner” from a series of famous theoretical disputes, it was Kurahara who came to define orthodox theory within the politicized part of the movement. It was he who set the agenda for much of the theoretical debate, both concerning organizational matters and artistic method. Yet he and others were criticized, at the time as well as in retrospect, for precipitating the decline of the movement by subjecting proletarian art to direct political dictates. This article examines Kurahara’s critical discourse in essays on literary method published from 1928 until his arrest in 1932. It seeks to determine, from the points of view of narratology and Marxist criticism, whether Kurahara’s insistence on party literature contributed to the demise of the movement. A close reading of Kurahara’s essays on literary method reveals that in fact he advocated an unbiased, critical type of realism largely in line with received notions of literary quality. The charge that his views were destructive of the proletarian literary movement thus appears unwarranted. On the other hand, the article concludes, mistakes concerning organizational matters, rather than strictly literary concerns, did play a part in the eventual demise of the movement.},
 pages = {231--273},
 title = {Kurahara Korehito’s Road to Proletarian Realism},
 volume = {20},
 year = {2008}
}