Rethinking Formations of Japanese Literary History: Deconstructing Binaries

• In Event: Japanese Literary Historiography: Past Present Future

Abstract

The prototype of what we consider today to be histories of Japanese literature emerged at the end of the 19th century, as part of an attempt to construct an imagined community of Japan as a modern nation-state in a wider geo-political order. In recent years, this national model, together with notions of “national language,” “literature,” and “Japan,” have been deconstructed and historicized. This awareness has produced skepticism toward totalizing literary histories, now viewed as largely modern ideological constructions, but this historical awareness has also opened up alternative approaches to rethinking a variety of modes of cultural production, interactions among divergent literary cultures, as well as the larger continuities, transformations, and disjunctions across the so-called premodern/modern or prewar/postwar divides.

This paper examines when, how, and why major discourses of literary historiography were formed from the end of the 19th century to the postwar period and pays particular attention to the ways in which they defined—prescriptively and generatively rather than descriptively—“literature,” genre, language, and periodization. I explore how these major discourses constructed, appropriated, and contested binary categories such as wa/kan, ga/zoku, feminine/masculine, native/foreign, original/imitation, Japanese literature/world literature, East/West, local/cosmopolitan, modern/premodern, and prewar/postwar. In the process, these discourses affected both views of literary tradition and contemporary practices of reading and writing. I argue that these major discourses—together with changing practices of reading and writing in relationship to contemporary media and information technology, and the educational system—have also impacted the contours of both real and imagined literary communities.

Author

• Tomi Suzuki, Columbia University