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Worlding the Japanese Literature. The Long Road from the Periphery to Internationalisation
Abstract
The present essay analyses the evolution of the Japanese literature considering the dynamics of the influences exerted in the modern age by two major cultures, namely the Chinese and the European cultures, placed in confluence with the Japanese culture. T
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Bringing together the analyses of the literary world-system, translation studies, and the research of European cultural nationalism, this book contests the view that texts can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, language, and position in the international book market. Focusing on Slovenian literature, almost unknown to world literature studies, this book addresses world literature’s canonical function in the nineteenth-century process of establishing European letters as national literatures. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, (semi)peripheral national movements sought international recognition through, among other things, the newly invented figure of the national poet. Writers central to dependent national communities were canonized to represent their respective cultures to the norm-giving Other – the emerging world literary canon and its aesthetic ideology. Hence, national literatures asserted their linguo-cultural individuality through the process of worlding; that is, by their positioning in the international literary world informed by the supposed universality of the aesthetic.
Chapter 1: Introduction. Pages 1-34
To frame the introduction of individual chapters, I discuss globalization as the economic, ideological, and intellectual ecosystem, in which literary studies—both in metropolises and peripheries—rediscovered Goethe’s Weltliteratur. World literature was reinterpreted either as liberating circulation and cross-cultural dialogism or hegemony of the literary world-system. Goethe initiated a meta-discourse on world literature that influenced transnational literary practices during the successive cycles of global capitalism. He expected literary circulation to enable an equal dialogue between nations, networking of the educated elite, and universal recognition of belated or (semi-)peripheral literatures. Marxism exposed Goethe’s concept as an ideologeme of European bourgeoisie’s global hegemony. Torn between dialogism and hegemony, the process of “worlding” (Kadir) and nationalizing European literatures has taken place since the early nineteenth century.
Chapter Two: The Canonicity of World Literature and National Poets. Pages 35-59
In the nineteenth century, national poets were invented to represent their respective communities to the Other symbolized by canonicity of world literature. Through “worlding,” national communities imagined their iconic poets as universal. Epitomizing Pan-European nationalization of literary discourse, Slovenians and Icelanders canonized their respective national poets France Prešeren (1800–1849) and Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845) to counter dependency and peripherality of their emerging literatures. In the international arena, national poets were believed to demonstrate that a particular nation—especially if stateless—resembles the established nations and meets universal aesthetic standards of the world canon. These poets themselves initiated their worlding by rendering the topics of national importance in the aesthetic codes they transferred from the core literary systems of modern Europe.
Chapter Three: Perspectivizing World Literature (in Translation). Pages 61-80
The materialist-systemic interpretation of world literature, with its center/periphery antagonism, has been criticized for reinforcing the centrality of Western geoculture, whereas liberal-cosmopolitan approaches have been accused of reproducing Western-centrism by imposing Eurochronology, the aesthetic mode of reading, and English as the privileged language of translation. Perspectivism has arisen as an alternative to the centric model of world literature. In its commitment to defy literary inequality, however, perspectivism does not account for the economic, political, and linguistic-cultural overdetermination of the global interliterary exchange within the world translation system. Although literary innovation is by no means limited to centers, the pressures of the literary world-system condition, select, and channel its global circulation. Modernist poetry of Srečko Kosovel (1904–1926) and its translations are a case in point.
Chapter Four: The Birth of National Literature from the Spirit of the Classical Canon. Pages 81-140
Based on Beecroft “ecology of world literature,” the chapter discusses the role of canon formation in the processes of nationalizing and autonomizing literature. These lead from vernacular literatures to national literary ecologies organized in a modern literary world-system. In the early Slovenian poetry from the Enlightenment to Post-Romanticism, the imagining of the emerging national literary system and its growing canon allegorized the efforts toward the standardization and cultivation of national literary language. In this context, intertextual indigenization of Parnassus and Elysium, classical topoi of canonicity, served as an autopoietic strategy of a nascent literary system (nested in the predominantly German-speaking Habsburg Empire) to assimilate the cosmopolitan patterns of the Classical canon and capitalize on its Pan-European prestige.
Chapter Five: World Literature in Carniola. Pages 141-197
In the 1830s, the theorist Matija Čop (1797–1835) and the poet France Prešeren were transferring German nationalist universalism to the Habsburg land Carniola. Adopting Schlegelian cosmopolitanism, they attempted to cultivate Slovenian literary language and overcome literary backwardness. Poetic discourse, saturated by European aesthetic resources, represented to them a shortcut by which Slovenians—lacking a public sphere and institutions of their own—could catch up with developed European nations. Čop’s networking, library, and expertise were in line with Goethe’s envisioning of world literature. The same applies to Prešeren’s poetics, which cast individualized discourse and national commitment into universal aesthetic patterns of world literature from Antiquity to the present. Prešeren’s Romantic classic thus represents the founding inscription of world literature in the national literary ecology.
Chapter Six: A Compromise “World Text”. Pages 199-218
Nineteenth-century European literatures witnessed the move from classical to modern writing (Barthes). Whereas the novel as a popular form of modern writing represented the national character of core literatures, peripheries instead grounded their nationhood on the epic as a genre of classical writing. Prešeren’s Byronic verse tale of 1836 illustrates a peripheral “modern epic” (Moretti). Fragmented, ambiguous, evoking the epic tradition, novelistic plot, and world history, it is about the compromise of an epic hero and his renunciation of the national cause. While Prešeren’s poem entered the canon as epitomizing the national “essence,” the first Slovenian novel, which in 1866 came across as a compromise between an international form and local perspective (Moretti’s formula), remained popular without being representative of the nation.
Chapter Seven: Worlding the National Poet in the World-System of Translation. Pages 219-255
Worlding includes practices by which agencies of particular literature, perceiving themselves within the global literary ecology, attempt to become universally visible. Coextensive with his canonization as the national poet, the imaginary worlding of Prešeren was successful. His external worlding began with Slavic interliterariness within the Austrian Empire. Even though German and Russian translations of the 1880s were promising, his actual presence in the translation world-system does not correspond to homegrown perceptions. Prešeren, a peripheral classic, lacked cosmopolitan networking and international presence during his lifetime. Written in a small language, his style resists translation, no major consecrator or global publisher has discovered him, and he has not suited global market demands. Hence, his peripherality has kept him from worldwide recognition as belonging to the Romantic hyper-canon.
The book and individual chapters accessible at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9#toc
The diplomat and Japanese and Korean scholar William George Aston (1841–1911) wrote several highly regarded publications, particularly on the Japanese language. This work is a chronological survey of Japanese literature from its early songs to the European-influenced works of the nineteenth century. It covers lyrics, poetry, prose and children's stories, and charts the major themes in the history of Japanese learning. At the time of publication in 1899, Japanese literature was little known to European readers, and Aston is careful to assume no prior knowledge of the subject, focusing instead on the most important works and writers, and providing contextual political and religious detail where necessary. His treatment of contemporary literature, and of works not typically discussed for their literary merit, was groundbreaking. The book as a whole remained unsurpassed for eighty years. Aston's introductory survey of traditional Japanese religion, Shinto (1907), is also reissued in this series.
Symbols of Nationalism and Nihonjinron
- Harumi Befu
Befu, Harumi. "Symbols of Nationalism and Nihonjinron." Ideology and Practice in
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Remarks on the Study of Meiji Literature
- Masanobu Oda
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The Essence of the Novel. Translated by Nanette Twine
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Beyond the Rising Sun: Nationalism in Contemporary Japan
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Rethinking the World in World Literature: East Asia and Literary Contact Nebulae
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colloque international de l'Espace Asie. Edited by Thierry Marres, Louvain-la-Neuve, Academia Bruylant, 2008, pp. 39-64.