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165 15 Constructing “Japanese Literature” Global and Ethnic Nationalism Haruo Shirane Japanese literature, especially classical Japanese literature, is thought by those both in and outside Japan to be the unique product of a nation called Japan , while the texts of Japanese literature are thought to embody the cultural characteristics of the “people” of Japan. Japanese literature as we know it today, however, has been deeply influenced by non-Japanese cultures, particularly that of China up until the late nineteenth century, and by Europe from the late nineteenth century onward. Furthermore, the two key notions of “nation” (kokka) and “literature” (bungaku) that lie behind today’s notion of kokubungaku , or what is now more frequently referred to as “Japanese literature” (Nihon bungaku), are in significant part a product of modern, nineteenth-century European notions of literature and nationhood. Needless to say, Chinese and earlier (ancient, medieval, and early modern) Japanese notions of literature and of the nation were critical in the formation of various aspects of what has come to be called “Japanese literature,” but it is of particular significance that modern European notions of “literature” and “nation” have played a major role in the construction of premodern Japanese literature. Today, when we speak of the Japanese literary classics, we think of Man’yōshū, Kojiki, The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Heike, Tsurezuregusa, nō plays, and the works of Matsuo Bashō, Ihara Saikaku, and Chikamatsu Monzaemon. This canon, however, is as much a result of reception in the medieval period, when the Japanese canon was first formed, as it is the product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which saw a radical reconfiguration of notions of literature and learning under Western influence.1 Nineteenth-Century European Notions of Literature Before the eighteenth century in Europe, “literature” in the broadest sense meant anything that was related to reading and writing. (The Latin word littera means “letter,” and litteratura originally implied knowledge of reading and writing.) Historically, however, the term “literature” was used more restrictively to refer to writings with intellectual, moral, aesthetic, or political value.2 Literature referred to the humanities broadly defined and to belles lettres , to writings of high quality, including those in the fields of history, theology , philosophy, and even natural science. From around the middle of the eighteenth century, the notion of literature gradually began to narrow even further to what today is referred to as creative or imaginative literature, with particular stress on the genres of poetry, the tale (prose fiction), and drama as opposed to other forms, such as rhetorical persuasion, didactic argumentation, and historical narration. The emergence of the notion of imaginative literature was closely connected to the rise of aesthetics (a term invented by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735) and the system of the arts, which had hitherto been indistinguishable from the sciences. In the eighteenth century, a major split emerged between the new humanities, associated with aesthetics, and the new sciences, associated with rationalism. By the nineteenth century, a clear distinction had been made between the producers of literature as art, who became the bearers of “imaginative truth,” and the philosophers and historians, who made a claim to a literal, objective, or “scientific” truth.3 In this new context, literature became the textual equivalent of the plastic arts (sculpture, painting, music, and so on). The emergence of this new notion of literature was accompanied by the slow rise in the prestige of the novel, which had hitherto not been considered literature but which came to enforce the notion of literature as imaginative or creative writing. This modern, nineteenth-century European notion of imaginative literature had a profound impact on the construction of both the institution and the field of modern kokubungaku, including the construction of “classical Japanese literature.” Bungaku, the word now used for literature, first appeared in Confucius ’s Analects, where it meant “learning,” “studies,” or “scholars,” particularly Confucian scholars. In the early 1870s, Nishi Amane (1829–1897), an early Meiji scholar of Western studies, adapted the word to translate the nineteenthcentury European term for “literature” in Hyakugaku Renkan (Encyclopedia, 1870), using it for humanities or belles lettres in general. In the Meiji period, the term bungaku embraced two notions: a concept of humanities or belles lettres that fused earlier Japanese and Chinese notions of literature and learning with the broader European conception of literature as humanities, and a more 166 Haruo Shirane [3.19.31.73] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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