Meiji literary historiography: The production of modern Japanese literature.

Abstract

My dissertation explores the chaotic discursive space of Meiji (1868--1912) by analyzing the various discourses that intersect in Tsubouchi Shoyo's <italic> Shosetsu shinzui</italic> (<italic>The Essence of the Novel</italic>, 1885), a theoretical work that is considered to be the manifesto of modern Japanese literature. By virtue of the historical moment of the text's production, these forces are inextricably connected to the construction of national boundaries. I read <italic>Shosetsu shinzui</italic> as being motivated by the effort to construct a literary tradition that would represent the newly established nation state. The importance of analyzing <italic>Shosetsu shinzui</italic> lies in its status as the purported origin of modern Japanese literary history. Literary historians habitually characterize <italic>Shosetsu shinzui</italic> as the first work to call for the modernization of literature and begin their narratives with this text. As a result, the disciplinary boundaries of literature generated in <italic>Shosetsu shinzui</italic> are taken for granted. My dissertation shows that, in order to produce these boundaries, Shoyo carried out a filtering process by selecting certain texts to be included in literature while excluding other texts. I's positioning at the origin, however, suppresses such a filtering process and obscures choices that continue to shape the entire institution of modern Japanese literature today. One of the main characteristics of the new National Literature is, I argue, the effacement of the political. By closely analyzing the main constituents of modern <italic>shosetsu</italic> (customarily translated as the novel) as defined in <italic>Shosetsu shinzui</italic> and put into practice in Shoyo's experimental fiction, <italic>Tosei shosei katagi</italic> (<italic>Character of Modern Students</italic>, 1885), I show how these two texts de-politicized the realm of modern <italic>shosetsu </italic>. However, I contend that this de-politicization was actually deeply political; it embraces a certain form of politics that manifests itself as a concealment of the political. My project is thus an attempt to analyze what was suppressed and in turn expressed in the production of National Literature and to bring to the fore the ideological ground upon which the institution of modern Japanese literature is founded.