2021 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Beyond Genius: Gender, Ethnicity and Authorship in the Modern Japanese Literary Field
| Project/Area Number |
21K12932
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| Research Institution | Waseda University |
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Principal Investigator |
PITARCH PAU 早稲田大学, 文学学術院, 准教授 (40813837)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2021-04-01 – 2024-03-31
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| Keywords | Modern Literature / Authorship / Gender / Ethnicity |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
In 2021, I presented my research on the early Japanese-language works of Cheong Yeon-gyu (1899-1979) at the conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies (8/27/2021). What makes Cheong a particularly interesting case to study competing ideas about authorship is how his media presence highlights the coexistence of two ways of conceptualizing and presenting his value as a writer to the Japanese public: one based on his ethnic representativeness, and another on his individual sensibility. His publisher and some proletarian critics present his work as the result of his people’s history, and give it value implicitly as a testimony of their long history of oppression. Cheong himself uses the language of Humanistic Cosmopolitanism to build for himself an image that is not tied to his ethnicity or the history of his fellow Koreans, but attempts to position himself along contemporary writers that had blended social criticism with commercial success like Shimada Seijiro; or Kagawa Toyohiko.
I am also working on completing an article-length manuscript on Okamoto Kanoko (1889-1939)
and her deep interest in the connections between mental abnormality and artistic creativity. Even though her essays and autobiographical writings rarely mention her episodes of mental illness, in her fiction it occupies a central place in the process of artistic creation, but always split into two different characters: one of whom derives their creativity from the pathological states the other experiences.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
The continued effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have affected my ability to travel to attend conferences and workshops. Additionally, unpredictable and irregular closures of daycare services due to contagion-curbing measures have affected my ability to plan and implement my research work.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I plan to continue my research on Cheong Yeon-gyu and turn it into an article-length piece. I am going to present my current work on him at the upcoming Modern Languages Association International Symposium (6/2/2022).
As for the other vectors of my research, I am starting to work on two new themes:
1) The authorial persona of Otsuka Kusuoko (1875-1910), an unjustly forgotten novelist and poet whose work provides rich materials to think about the spaces afforded to women writers in the Meiji era. (I have sent a proposal to present on her to the conference Cultural Typhoon 2022 that will take place in Tokyo in September this year.)
2) The afterlife of Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927) as a symbolic presence in fiction written both in Japanese and Korean in the Japanese Empire, to explore how ideas about authorship embodied by Akutagawa served marginalized authors to stake a claim at participation in the canonical mainstream, at the same time as they shed light on the blind spots and unspoken gender, and ethnic hierarchies that shaped it. (I have sent a proposal to present on this work at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference that will take place in Los Angeles in November this year.)
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| Causes of Carryover |
The conferences I had planned to present at were cancelled, moved online, or were postponed to 2022. I plan to use the remaining funds to attend international conferences this year.
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Research Products
(1 results)
