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- Convenor:
-
Kimiko Kōno
(Waseda University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Machiko Midorikawa
(Waseda University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Pre-modern Literature
- Location:
- Auditorium 5 Jeanne Weimer
- Sessions:
- Saturday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel examines mutual influences and relationships between the changing vessels in which premodern literary works were encountered and the changing guises of the texts therein, taking up the specific cases of Sinographic letters, Japanese waka poetry, and the classicist exegetical tradition.
Long Abstract:
How are works of literature made manifest to an audience? Despite the tradition’s noted wealth of less-mediated literary modes, it is broadly recognized that throughout Japanese history the paradigmatic textual encounter has been a concretely scribal one. Yet how precisely has literature been delivered to reader experience? And how have readers, through a variety of media, realized access to the literature thus presented them? Quite beyond well-known distinctions of scroll or codex format, literature in premodern Japan reached its audience in a broad array of materially divergent forms, from occasional tanzaku slips and hand-held fans to more substantial hanging scrolls and folding screens, and even monumental plaques. Nor were any of these literary tableaux, small or large, permanent: texts were now harvested piecemeal for valued scraps, now wholesale absorbed into larger collections, their layouts continually recast and rearranged. This play across the morphological spectrum, moreover, while not without elements of fancy, was no doubt largely the product of deliberate intention. What effects, however, whether purposed or accidental, did this shape-shifting of books and other media exercise upon the broadcast message of the literature they bore? Or upon the viewing, reading, studying audience? What was, in the end, actually expected from literature?
This panel considers the mutual influences and relationships between the mutable outward vessels in which premodern literary works were discovered and the changing guises of the texts met therein. Our goal is to understand the various functions that literature fulfilled, not only in private reader encounter, but also in the larger life of the ambient social public. The three panelists explore these questions through the specific cases of Sinographic letters, Japanese waka poetry, and the classicist exegetical tradition. We seek to demonstrate the potential of a research program that teams the approaches of both textual and bibliographical perspectives, while attending equally to Sinitic and Japanese dimensions. Literature’s enacted significance, we argue, is inseparable from the given textual prism through which it reaches an audience in countless particular refractions. It is above all this range of manifested literary experience that our panel attempts to bring into focus.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 19 August, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This paper illustrates the importance of book format for the reception of premodern literary works. It looks at parallel examples of diverging format in books of the same work, focusing on the imperial anthologies, to show how even textual interpretation could diverge with variety in textual form.
Paper long abstract:
A straitened, unifocal attention to alone the textual content preserved by a given work’s corpus of diverse exemplars continues, even today, to bedevil literary scholarship. Variants in attested text between surviving documentary witnesses might well come up for consideration, but on the question of the transmitting books themselves, or the influence exercised by a book’s form and format on the text it encompassed, one observes a certain awareness deficit. Yet it is clear that premodern Japanese books existed in a variety of contemporary and mutually contrasting formats, choice among which was anything but aleatory, guided both by the intent of a book’s production and the nature of its delivered text. Careful attention, consequently, to the format of a book, to its profile of distinct morphological properties, offers a promising avenue of approach when determining a text’s character or judging its reliability. In this paper, by looking at parallel examples of diverging format in books housing the same work, with a focus on imperial anthology texts, I consider precisely how the interpretation of a text might itself diverge under the influence of such formal variety.
Furthermore, I take up cases of works being received, not solely in books of unimpaired completeness, but over time additionally in a range of disassembled iterations, each enjoying its own reception. During the Edo period, it frequently happened that older books of marred integrity were simply broken up, their dismantled components being repurposed into “old calligraphic fragments” (kohitsu-gire) for appreciation primarily as aesthetic objects. The reception of such calligraphic samples, moreover, was by no means naively visual: professional appraisal of a fragment’s copyist was understood by contemporaries as prerequisite to any appreciation worthy of the name. Examining this phenomenon in concrete detail and across a number of dimensions, this paper will thus also explore the various novel modes of waka reception to which such a progressive severance, division, and calligraphic appraisal of earlier texts gave birth.
Through these two complementary investigations, I hope to illustrate the importance of attention to the relationship between literary works and the forms of the books that preserved them.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, after reviewing Kūkai’s own textual legacy, I survey various forms of media used to carry works of literary Chinese from the Heian period and beyond. I consider the manner in which these texts existed as material “things,” and how this “shaped” their historical meaning and function.
Paper long abstract:
When Kūkai (774-835) returned home from his sojourn in Tang-dynasty China, he came bearing a significant cargo in foreign-origin texts. Among other characteristics, this invaluable collection stands out particularly for its variety. For example, in a list of texts later offered up by Kūkai to Emperor Saga, in addition to several contemporary-era poetry collections, we find reference to textual objects such as “Dezong Huangdi zhenji” (Authentic Calligraphy of the Emperor Dezong) and “Bukong sanzang bei” (Stele-text of the Tripiṭaka Master Amoghavajra), even to something called “Feibai shu” ([Writings in the] ‘Flying White Script’). Nor was this variety limited to dimensions only of content, but extended also to differing modes of textual presentation and consumption. It is recorded, for instance, that at Saga’s request, Kūkai undertook to produce a “textual” folding screen, one to be decorated with writing by Kūkai’s own hand. Moreover, in the various dedicatory texts provided by Kūkai to accompany these offerings, we find copious evidence of a guiding sensibility, leaving little doubt that as much in the production of texts as in their delivery, much care and thought was given to physical medium, to calligraphic style, indeed even to textual layout. The relationship between texts themselves, in other words, and the particulars of their physical manifestations, was a matter of constant preoccupation.
In this paper, starting with an investigation of Kūkai’s own textual legacy in discourse and artifact, I look at various forms of media used to carry works of literary Chinese. Focusing in particular on the Heian and medieval periods, I take up questions such as: What was the significance of texts found on “media” like folding screens and monumental plaques? How should we understand the shape and purpose of texts found, not in books, but rather in hanging scrolls made for viewing and display? Why were mere fragments of books collected and even appreciated as objects in and of themselves? More generally, I seek to understand the manner in which Japanese texts of Chinese prose and poetry existed as material “things,” gleaning from their examined media incarnations the essence of their contemporary meaning and function.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I address the sixteenth-century transformation that we observe in Genji studies by recasting it in the bibliographical terms through which it was actually manifested and experienced, seeking in the contemporary proliferation of textual forms the site of the tradition’s new vitality.
Paper long abstract:
While the exegetical history of the Tale of Genji may have wended its way across a millennium without break, as a narrative in its own right this continuity is not without its share of bends and turns. Particularly notable is the curious arc spanning the long sixteenth century, when, against a background of rampant national disorder, the then already long-established field of Genji studies experienced its first great period of consolidation. Not only in their number and unprecedented pace are the commentaries of this period distinguished from those of prior eras, but also in their evident integrative drive. This is most obvious in massive omnibus commentaries like nobleman Nakanoin Michikatsu’s Mingō nisso (1598), longer than the target work itself and exuberantly comprehensive of its predecessors to the point of sometimes otiose repetition. Yet just as indicative of the overall trend (albeit in a different sense) are learned opuscules like renga master Sōgi’s Broom Tree Commentary (1485), which sought to take the eponymous chapter as sufficiently thematically encompassing of Murasaki’s work to stand for it, part for whole.
Giving due weight to the range of factors previously adduced as explanatory of Sengoku-era classicism writ large, foremost among them the concomitant spread of both literacy and warzone-fleeing literati, it seems clear that a more proximate context for this Genji boom should first be sought in the textual environment in which it took place. Yet even in specialized studies of this era’s exegetical history, such bibliographical context has been left largely fallow as a field of inquiry, perhaps precisely because these developments precede the advent of mass printing that might otherwise have explained them.
In this paper, I address this dimension of the sixteenth-century exegetical transformation that we observe thus clearly, though hardly exclusively, in the case of Genji studies. Recasting the phenomenon in the bibliographical terms through which it was actually manifested and experienced by all contemporary publics, I seek in the contemporary proliferation of textual forms a site of the tradition’s new vitality, those simultaneous processes of sedimentation, diffusion, anthologization, and disintegration that marked the fractured florescence of late-medieval Genji studies.