Reading Against Culture: Ideology and Narrative in the Japanese Novel

Reading against Culture starts from the problem that a concept of "culture" is both destructive and necessary. Culture constitutes the environment within which self develops and interacts with other; as a closed environment of self-identity, however, culture inevitably implies alterity and exclusion. David Pollack proposes that only by reading "against" culture--both by understanding how our involvement in it conditions our writing and reading, and by understanding how its inclusion of self entails the exclusion of other--can we begin to resist the hegemonic impulse inherent in reading across cultures.