Le différend : la question des responsabilités de guerre et de la réorientation chez Yoshimoto Takaaki entre 1955 et 1958

Abstract

The poet Yoshimoto Takaaki’s career as a critical thinker took off in the 1950s, notably through a widely remarked essay on ideological conversion in which he established an equivalence between converts and non-converts. We argue that his thoughts on ideological conversion were rooted in the polemic work he engaged in – along with Takei Teruo – on the war responsibility of progressive writers. We seek to identify the originality of Yoshimoto’s approach by discussing and presenting the development of this controversy as well as its actors, implications and general intellectual context.

Keywords

• Postwar
• Communism
• Literature
• Thought
• War responsibility
• Second World War