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16 What Is Bungaku? The Reformulation of the Concept of “Literature” in Early Twentieth-Century Japan Suzuki Sadami This essay seeks, first, to clarify what is meant by the term bungaku, or literature , in the context of modern Japanese letters. In particular, it seeks to examine the shift in the meaning of this key term from an earlier, broader and more general definition to one that is more narrowly focused on literature as a form of high, or fine, creative, linguistic act. The process of redefining the meaning of bungaku began through the efforts of a few scholars of Western civilization, novelists and literary critics beginning in the mid-1880s. During the 1890s and early 1900s, conceptual conflicts over the older and newer definitions of the term continued, but by 1910 the new meaning had been firmly established. Second, I will discuss three elements that combined to make this reconfiguration possible: (1) changes in the Japanese academic system that led to the reorganization of the Division of Humanities (Bunka Daigaku) at Tokyo Imperial University in 1904; (2) changes in the way that the bundan, or “literary world,” came to be constituted in the 1900s; and (3) changes in artistic tastes, or the aesthetic revolution that swept literary journalism in the form of the naturalist movement in literature around 1907. Finally, by examining this reconfiguration process and its historical meaning , I hope to elucidate the ready-made ways in which we have thought about modern Japanese literature in the past and thereby bring about a fundamental change in the way we will talk about literature in the future. The aesthetic revolution is often said to have been incomplete in changing the purpose of art from the pursuit of beauty to the pursuit of truth in human life because it clung to romantic trends and because it was a distorted and warped version of the European naturalism that emerged out of Japan’s delayed modernization. 176 As a matter of fact, Japanese naturalism did cling to a so-called romantic perspective , namely, the core idea of unity of self and “natural life” or source of “life” in the cosmos. In other words, it was a sort of vitalism formed in the vortex of ideas from modern biology and traditional Eastern philosophies. Moreover , new philosophies from twentieth-century Europe—Bergsonism, for example —acted as the driving force in its formation. Furthermore, because Bergsonism willed to overcome the modern through mechanism and teleology, we find in it the birth of the will to overcome modernity that brought on the crises of modern Japanese life, such as, for example , competition between nation-states, the Russo-Japanese War, and the rapid development of heavy and chemical industrialization and urbanization, accompanied by a huge consumption of human labor in early twentieth-century Japan. This led to the flowering of arts in the Taishō era and afterward to the production of many interesting innovations that sought to advance the modern artistic style. Finally, it came to support the imperial war of Japan. Now we stand at a time when it is necessary to rethink and rewrite the art and cultural history of twentieth-century Japan. Although by 1887 many Japanese scholars of European civilization had embraced the modern concept of literature as a creative “linguistic art” and a group of Japanese novelists and critics sought to catch up with the modern realistic style of the European novel, it was not until the second decade of the twentieth century that bungaku came to be equated in Japan with the concept of artistic production. The reason for this delay or gap is quite clear: There were two competing definitions of literature in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, and the broader and more inclusive definition of literature as incorporating not only creativity but also the “humanities” continued to be dominant. Therefore, literature as linguistic art was specifically identified as “bi-bungaku” (belles lettres) or “jun-bungaku” (pure literature) from the 1890s to around 1910. For example, the novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) used the word “jun-bungaku” in his novel Gubijinsō of 1908 to refer to the subject matter of English and/or German literature then being taught at the Division of Humanities at Tokyo Imperial University. It was early in the Meiji era that the word “bungaku” was first used to translate the English word “literature.” At the time it was seen as an inclusive term...

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