SOURCE: “Reflexivity in the Stories of Kunikida Doppo,” in Japan Quarterly, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, April-June, 1984, pp. 159-63.

In the following essay, Mortimer discusses reflexivity in several of Doppo's short stories

The word “reflexivity” has become an inescapable and, perhaps, all-too-fashionable term of contemporary literary criticism. At the risk of simplification, one might say that it is used to indicate the way in which a literary text defines itself as literature, and it involves the presumption that every literary text, implicitly or explicitly, exhibits some degree of self-contemplation, some reflection upon its own textual status. One may well accept the theory that reflexivity is an inevitable component of the literary text, but this does not necessarily mean that it is the component most worthy of critical attention. Before we can usefully speak of “reflexive texts,” or récits spéculaires, we ought to admit that some texts are a...