Literature as a Global Theory

Japanese literature traces its beginnings to oral traditions that were rst recorded in written form in the early eighth century after a writing system was introduced from China. The Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and Nihon shoki (Chronicle of Japan) were completed in 712 and 720, respectively, as government projects. The former is an anthology of myths, legends, and other stories, while the latter is a chronological record of history. The Fudoki (Records of Wind and Earth), compiled by provincial o cials beginning in 713, describe the history, geography, products, and folklore of the various provinces.

Japanese Language and Literature, 2020

emphasis here is on the myth and illusion sustained in mainstream Japanese literary history and anthologies about the national language of Japanese (kokugo) as a singular and unifying tongue that serves as the nexus for race, culture, nationality, and literary expression, reinforcing a simplistic yet strong impression that Japanese literature is a product of a monolingual condition, at the expense of consigning those who do not fit with mainstream literary history to the margins. 1 However, the spontaneous challenge to the monolingual condition arises from the very fabric of the orthography of the Japanese language,

2012

This article discusses the concept of a new textbook of the history of Japanese literature commissioned by the Polish Scientific Publishers PWN in Warsaw, which was further developed during the writing process. The purpose of the book had to be decided before writing, as well as my thoughts on my earlier book on Japanese literature. To start, it was necessary to decide on the division of the contents into periods, as well as the genres and problems within a given epoch. It was also necessary to take into consideration the scope of civilization information introduced into the history of literature, the degree of dependence of Japanese literature on the literatures of neighboring countries, as well as on European and American literatures. I call the aforementioned matters aspects – points of view on the ways these problems are dealt with in the contents of the publication, and explain the contents comprised of the outlines of six epochs, with the onset of contacts with China in the 6t...

HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, 2019

Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese literature all used Chinese characters, received Chinese literary influence, and tried to create national writing based on Chinese characters' application. In this article, I will delve into the issue of influential language, literature and literary genres within the Chinese character cultural sphere, while also detailing the specific nature and temperament of the developmental process in regards to each country's literature.

CLCWeb : Comparative Literature and Culture , 2024

Japanese intellectuals in the Meiji era, in their pursuit of modern nation-building, construed Japanese cultural particularities in reaction to the professed Western universals. Conversely, a false notion of Western universality formed contemporary Western intellectuals’ views of Japanese culture. It helped to address Japanese culture, not in equal terms, but as something exotic that therefore required attention. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, Western intellectuals (mis)appropriated Japanese literature. Yet, the Japanese toiled to export Japanese culture to the West, less so to offer Japanese cultural specificities, but as a way of seeking Western acceptance. Such transcultural circulation has not been characterized by binary oppositions, but by ambiguous positions adopted by the historical actors involved in such cultural transactions. This presentation does a comparative study of the translation and adaptation of a medieval Japanese literary text called Hōjōki (1212) into European languages produced during the said period by both Japanese and Western scholars to explore the textual strategies adopted to suit their respective political agendas. By analyzing Marcello Muccioli’s Italian translation of Hōjōki, and the role Japanese Fascist leader Harukichi Shimoi played in its production, the presentation unravels the ambiguous positions taken by them in the process of cultural exchanges and how translation aids our understanding of this process. Then the presentation explores the further circulation of the Italian translation and cites the case of English modernist poet Basil Bunting’s poetic adaptation of Hōjōki. Through a close reading of Bunting’s poem, the presentation will show how translation exposes certain meta-universal ideas shared by geographically and temporally divided faraway cultures. This presentation traces a trajectory of a medieval Japanese literary text called Hōjōki (1212) during late ninetieth and early twentieth century to explore the western reader’s imposition of the western universal ideas in their understanding of the work. It also discusses how and why the Japanese intellectuals exported Japanese literature by drawing parallels with western notions and concepts anticipating West’s recognition of Japanese culture. However, simultaneously they were concerned about the Japanese cultural particularities being lost in the process of cultural dissemination. Finally, this paper discusses on the capability of translation – a major tool for cultural transference – to overcome the universal-particular binary and make the world literary space equitable where both universals and particulars can coexist side by side.

2017

In order to introduce this research to English-language scholars, this paper begins with offering a historical background on the development of late Qing and early Republican fiction studies in Japan, covering research societies, publications, and scholars in the field. Second, it discusses questions related to new directions in the study of the May Fourth Movement. Third, it addresses groundbreaking studies on writers and translators outside the main stream of research, covering Lin Shu, Liu Tieyun 劉鐵雲, and Li Boyuan 李伯元. Further discussion examines thematic studies, limiting ourselves to editorship, detective fiction, and Japanese political fiction-themes that were highly relevant because their authors engaged in important questions related to cultural reforms and the evolution and formation of modern fiction, its genres, and concerns. Japanese scholarship on modern Chinese fiction is usually categorized into three generations, based on the motivations and scope of their research: the first generation emerged in the 1930s and 1940s when Chinese literature was introduced to Japan. The second wave began in the 1950s, following the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Finally, a third generation appeared in the 1970s after the Sino-Japanese Joint Statement signed in 1972 (Wong 1988, 113-14, 123). 6 Although division into "generations" can be historically misleading, it can be useful for analytical purposes to examine the trends and motivations behind Japanese scholarship. The roots of Japanese scholarship on this literature can be traced back to the Chinese Literature Association 中國文學研究 會 (Chūgoku bungaku kenkyūkai) founded in March 1934 by the alumni Okazaki Toshio 岡崎俊夫 , Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹内好 and others from the Chinese Philosophy and Literature Department of the Imperial University of Tokyo, participants had collaborated in Japanese publications before. 6 A similar division is suggested in which emphasizes the difference between pre-and post-1949 research (1, 7-8).

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017

This chapter traces the origins and nature of the shared literary heritage in the East Asian “Sinographic Sphere,” namely China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, focusing on developments before the early modern period, in keeping with the temporal and thematic scope of this handbook. It explores modes of cross-cultural communication and textual culture conditioned by the Chinese script, including gloss-reading techniques, “brush talk,” and biliteracy; surveys shared political and social institutions and literary practices, sustained by the flourishing book trade; and touches on the rise of vernacular literatures, the dynamic between Literary Chinese and local vernaculars, and the role of women. With the recent death of Literary Chinese as the lingua franca of East Asia we are facing a new phase in world history. The Chinese-style literatures of East Asia point to cultural commonalities and tell stories of creative engagement with Chinese literary history that offer insights about Chinese ...

Huang Zhuoyue, 2020

In the 19th century, the English term "literature" and its Chinese equivalent "文学" (wenxue) had their respective connotations and prehistories and did not belong to the same discursive genealogy, although the two concepts later mixed together and have since been inter-translated by scholars. This paper attempts to examine literature as an independent system of representation by analyzing historical materials of English sinology to identify their special meanings in the 19th-century English context. To ensure the wholeness of the examination, this paper divides the collected materials into three categories; annotations in English-Chinese dictionaries, denotations in works with the word "literature" in their titles, and explanations in articles and chapters (of works) with the word "literature" in their titles. Such an examination inevitably involves some key issues related to semantics, history of translation and cross-cultural studies. It is hoped that this study can help further a general understanding of the dissemination history of literature as a concept.

Invented in sixteenth-century Europe, the "ideographic myth"-the notion that all Chinese written characters are pictorial-has long been used either to romanticize or denigrate Chinese language and culture compared to those of the West. This article examines the many incarnations of this myth spanning more than half a century: from the Fenollosa-Poundian theory of the Chinese character and Ezra Pound's reformulation of his Vorticist-Imagist ideals in the early twentieth century to the Imagist influence on modern Chinese poetry in the 1910s-1920s, and Sinologists' reinterpretations of traditional Chinese poetry in the 1970s. Originated from Xu Shen's 許 慎 (30-124) Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (Explanations of Simple and Compound Characters) in China, indiscreet ideogrammic explanations of Chinese characters made their way first to Japan, then through Fenollosa and Pound to the United States, and then back to China, marking the beginning of the age of international travel as well as a new model of cultural connectivity not limited to geographic boundaries. As an interesting case from a cultural export to a cultural import, the pictorial myth reinvented by Fenollosa and Pound, together with its incarnations, turned out to be beneficial to all cultures involved along its rapid but complex route of transmission. Both insights and errors arising therefrom not only helped modernist poets revolutionize their poetry in both China and the West but also inspired Sinologists to reinterpret traditional Chinese poetry from the perspective of the Chinese written character, especially the primacy of its sound.

Japanese Studies, 2020