Dark Modernity

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Kinds of Noir: Transnational Realism in Postwar America, Europe and Japan (Yoichiro Miyamoto)
• Kurosawa Noir
• Transnational Noir
• Modernity as a network
• The summer of noir
• Noir Americanization
• Bibliography
• The Dark City of Modernity: From “The Killers” to the City noir (Hans-Peter Rodenberg)
• The changing image of urbanity
• Narrating the Dark City - the urban newspaper hack
• The new popular heroes of the silver screen
• The city, a space of psychopaths
• Bibliography
• The Stylistic Aesthetic of Disfiguration: The Style of Modernity in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (Eisuke Kawada)
• I. The challenge of valorizing “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
• Religious Quality
• Exclusiveness of the symbolic interpretation
• Ignorance of Hemingway’s experiment in style
• II. The necessity of a stylistic analysis
• III. Disfiguration – The style and its aesthetics of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
• Verticality and horizontality: literary space in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
• Disfiguration and indeterminacy as effects of modernity
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Strange Revelations: Re-encountering Diane Arbus’s Photographic Work (Astrid Böger)
• Bibliography
• “Maybe the war will be over”: Alternative Futures and Equivocal Closure in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (Tamara Radak)
• Bibliography
• Reading Woolf Against Trauma: Shell Shock and Gender in Mrs. Dalloway (Kodai Abe)
• From Trauma to Shell Shock
• Septimus and Shell Shock
• Clarissa and Shell Shock
• Epiphany as a Modernist-Feminist Violation
• Bibliography
• Interopticality and the Atomic Phantom: Jaws, Godzilla, and America’s Legacy of War (Bunei Kohara)
• The Premise: Image as Immediate Given
• Uncharted Depths: Unveiling Watergate and the Vietnam War as Hidden Contexts
• Engaging the Surface: Visual Layers and Literal Meanings in Focus
• From Surface to Surface: Godzilla (1954) vs. Jaws (1975)
• Interopticality
• Conclusion: Interopticality and a New Frontier of Jaws Analysis
• 1. Opening sequence
• 2. Oxygen Destroyer and Hooper’s oxygen tank
• 3. The Monster’s Descent to the Sea Floor
• 4. Brody Aiming at the Shark from a Prone Position
• Bibliography
• The Terrible Modernity of War: A Bricolage of Artistic Responses in Japan and America (Hans-Peter Rodenberg)
• Prelude: Francisco Goya’s War as Disaster
• 1. Yoshitoshi Tsukioka’s haunted warriors
• 2. Ambrose Bierce’s American Civil War
• 3. Saitō Sanki’s unpatriotic “newsreel” haiku
• 4. Miyamoto Saburō’s conflicting discourses
• 5. Post-modernist aftermath: Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima
• Bibliography
• Contributors

Yoichiro Miyamoto and Hans-Peter Rodenberg (eds.)

Dark Modernity

East-West Perspectives

Berlin · Bruxelles · Chennai · Lausanne · New York · Oxford

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miyamoto, Yōichirō, 1955- editor http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nr2003015022 | Rodenberg, Hans-Peter editor http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n83236380

Title: Dark Modernity : East-West perspectives / Yoichiro Miyamoto, Hans-Peter Rodenberg, (eds.).

Description: Berlin ; New York : Peter Lang, 2025. | Series: American culture, 1615-567X ; 18 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025021089 (print) | LCCN 2025021090 (ebook) | ISBN 9783631939741 hardcover | ISBN 9783631939758 pdf | ISBN 9783631939765 epub

Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Aesthetics)--United States | Modernism (Aesthetics)--Japan | LCGFT: Essays http://id.loc.gov/authorities/genreForms/gf2014026094

Classification: LCC P96.C577 D37 2025 (print) | LCC P96.C577 (ebook) | DDC 700/.4112--dc23/eng/20250614

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025021089

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025021090

Cover illustration design by Hans-Peter Rodenberg

For credits see List of Figures

ISSN 1615-567X

ISBN 978-3-631-93974-1 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-631-93975-8 (E-PDF)

ISBN 978-3-631-93976-5 (E-PUB)

DOI 10.3726/b23072

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne (Switzerland)

Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin (Germany)

info@peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

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Contents

List of Figures

Introduction

Kinds of Noir: Transnational Realism in Postwar America, Europe and Japan

Yoichiro Miyamoto (Open University of Japan)

The Dark City of Modernity: From “The Killers” to the City noir

Hans-Peter Rodenberg (University of Hamburg)

The Stylistic Aesthetic of Disfiguration: The Style of Modernity in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

Eisuke Kawada (Kanazawa University)

Strange Revelations: Re-encountering Diane Arbus’s Photographic Work

Astrid Böger (University of Hamburg)

“Maybe the war will be over”: Alternative Futures and Equivocal Closure in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

Tamara Radak (University of Vienna)

Reading Woolf Against Trauma: Shell Shock and Gender in Mrs. Dalloway

Kodai Abe (University of Tsukuba)

Interopticality and the Atomic Phantom: Jaws, Godzilla, and America’s Legacy of War

Bunei Kohara (Komatsu University)

The Terrible Modernity of War: A Bricolage of Artistic Responses in Japan and America

Hans-Peter Rodenberg (University of Hamburg)

Contributors

List of Figures

Cover illustration design by Hans-Peter Rodenberg.

Cover illustration (clockwise):

1. Detail of door of the Chrysler Building, New York (Chris Sampson: “In and around the Chrysler Building”, Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, 22 July 2014)
2. Detail of screenshot Drunken Angel (1948, Toho Co., Ltd.)
3. Traditional Japanese seigaiha (青海波) pattern
4. Detail of LOOK magazine – photograph of Ernest Hemingway posing with a leopard (LOOK 18, no. 2 (26 January 1954): p. 21. Coll. of H.-P. Rodenberg (Cowles Communications, Inc./Publ. domain-Look/photographer: Earl Theissen).

Fig. 1.1: The chase in the L.A. sewer system in He Walked by Night. 1948. Screenshot. 01:15:08. Bryan Foy Productions.

Fig. 1.2: The sewer tunnels of Vienna in Carol Reed’s The Third Man. 1949. Screenshot. 01:36:46. London Films.

Fig. 1.3: The wanderings of Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune) in Drunken Angel. 1948. Screenshot. 00:16:05. Toho Co., Ltd.

Fig. 1.4: Police officer Murakami (Toshiro Mifune) in the streets of postwar Tokyo in Stray Dog. 1949. Screenshot. 00:18:06. Shintoho Co., Ltd.

Fig. 1.5: The “Blue Bird” girlie show in Stray Dog. 1949. Screenshot. 01:06:06. Shintoho Co., Ltd.

Fig. 1.6: The ecstatic “Jungle Boogie” singer (Shizuko Kasagi) in Drunken Angel. 1948. Screenshot. 00:54:28. Toho Co., Ltd.

Fig. 1.7: The black market cesspool in Drunken Angel. 1948. Screenshot. 00:56:06. Toho Co., Ltd.

Fig. 1.8: Okada (Reisaburo Yamamoto) and Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune) fighting in Drunken Angel. 1948. Screenshot. 01:29:49. Toho Co., Ltd.

Fig. 2.1: Professor Richard Henley (Edward G. Robinson) and Alice Reed (Joan Bennett) after the killing of Frank Howard in Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window. 1944. Publicity still. RKO Pictures.

Fig. 2.2: Kaiser Shipyards Co., “Dress right for Safety in the Shipyard”. Paper poster. Early 1940s. Artist unknown.

Fig. 7.1 and 7.2: Opening shots of Godzilla and Jaws in comparison. 1954, 1975. Screenshots. 00:02:19 → 00:02:47 → 00:03:36. Toho Co., Ltd.; 00:01:17 → 00:04:34 → 00:06:26. Zanuck/Brown & Universal Pictures.

Fig. 7.3 and 7.4: Oxygen Destroyer in Godzilla and Hooper’s Oxygen Tank in Jaws. 1954, 1975. Screenshots. 01:26:34. Toho Co., Ltd.; 01:51:45. Zanuck/Brown & Universal Pictures.

Fig. 7.5 to 7.7: Cover of the first edition of the novel JAWS (1974) and Atomic bombs “Little Boy” [Hiroshima] and “Fat Man/Mark III” [Nagasaki], 1945. Photographs. Wikipedia Pub. domain; US National Archives; US Department of Defense.

Fig. 7.8 to 7.10: Carcasses of Godzilla and the shark in Godzilla, Jaws and Godzilla Minus One. 1954, 1975, 2023. Screenshots. 01:33:39. Toho Co., Ltd.; 02:00:30. Zanuck/Brown & Universal Pictures. 01:58:47. Toho Studios/Robot Communications.