Since the gradual decline of postmodernism in the 1990s studies on modern Japanese literature have ceased to be aggressively theory-oriented but instead have become hopelessly conservative under the guise of cultural studies. Precisely to go against the grain of the current reactionary tendency, this paper will pursue a radical theorization of reading with the concept of the “third term” while referring to Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics and Roland Barthes' idea of “irreducible plurality.” Reading modern novels often falls into extreme relativism because there is no single “right” meaning in them. To overcome such textual anarchy, we must undertake “destined reconstruction” to discover a certain essence of reading by means of the “third term.” Here I will demonstrate such a theoretical experiment on Ōgai Mori's two texts Maihime and Utakata-no-ki.

Kenji Miyazawa wrote a series of dirges on his sister Toshiko's death in which she is represented as a ghostly figure suspended in limbo between life and death. His écriture in these dirges is somehow reminiscent of Maurice Blanchot's concept of the “gaze of Orpheus” in The Space of Literature in that it subverts the common usage of language. There are such extra-linguistic moments also in “Ginga-tetsudō-no-yoru” as when Giovanni gazes into the darkness of the “sky hole” without seeing anything at all. Miyazawa's texts are thus excellent material for exploring the “third term” in relation to écriture.

Kinosaki-nite has been generally regarded as a so-called “I” novel which reflects the author Naoya Shiga's private life. This paper will critically review this kind of definition and offer an alternative way of reading the text from the perspective of the “third term” theory. Beyond the binary opposition between reader-subject and text-object, the “third term” shows us a way of further bringing out the novel's textual and educational potentiality.

According to the new curriculum guidelines based on the report from the Central Council for Education, our age is so unpredictable that teachers are required to train students to develop the three categories of competence—knowledge, judgement, and motivation—to meet emergencies. Obviously the goal of the guidelines is not to promote some curriculum innovation but to merely justify the government's educational policy which insists on the acquisition of social skills. Here I will re-define “competence” in light of the “third term” and radically expand the notion of the “unpredictable age” to argue for the necessity of an epistemological shift in worldview. Such a radical turnover may begin with a modest educational experiment in the classroom which I will demonstrate through a new way of reading Lu Xun's “Kokyō” which focuses on the narrator as a device.

The changes in the political scene during the 1980s caused Marxism to decline very rapidly. Some left-wing thinkers felt it their duty to de-politicize Marx's works into “interesting books for contemporary readers” to prevent them from being outdated. Postmodernism was to a certain degree articulated in response to such de-politicization of Marxism. Indeed most postmodernists were exclusively engaged in textual deconstruction precisely because in this gesture they could pretend to be subversive and radical without making any political commitment. While referring to Minoru Tanaka's “third term” theory, here I will try to find a way to unite theory and practice again so that we can both theoretically and politically study literature.