Historicity

This research paper is an investigation of Khaled Hosseini’s seminal fiction The Kite Runner from the perspective of New Historicist approach of reading a literary work. The concepts of history and discourse, recurrently employed by Foucault, Montrose, and Greenblatt, provide the theoretical background of the present research. The plot of the novel is devoted to presenting a vivid picture of the socio-cultural conditions of Afghanistan at the period of war and crisis. During the time, many wars and conflicts were imposed upon Afghanistan for the interests of foreign powers. Russia invaded Afghanistan, and it ended up in Taliban war, hunger, uncertainty in the subjects’ lives, and refugees question. Russian army had destroyed the village, school, and natural resources of Afghanistan while America indirectly dominated there to support the Taliban against Russia in the cold war period. The Kite Runner including historical facts about Afghanistan’s multi-layered conditions, let the readers face the true nature of war, terrorism, and Taliban in the country. Exploring the cultural crisis and ethnic conflict represented in the novel is conducted in a close association with the New Historicist’s concept of “textuality of history and historicity of text”.

The reception of Popper in Japan has not been a glorious history up to the present day. There have been numerous misunderstandings and distortions. It is important to record and discuss them in order to learn from them and to make use of his ideas in the Japanese intellectual climate. This is the purpose of the present paper. From the perspective of the reception history, we searched the reasons why Popper has been misunderstood in Japan (especially in four areas: philosophy, economics, history, and political philosophy), and tried to identify some of the factors responsible for this misunderstanding. To this end, we applied the method of “situational analysis” to the Japanese peculiar intellectual situation after the so-called après guerres, rather than by using a chronological order. If the causes of misunderstandings and distortions in Japan can be clarified by means of a situational analysis, we can learn a great deal from this history and can use this knowledge to throw new light on the status of critical rationalism in Japan