Workshop: The Heredity of Desire: Love and its Literary Contestations Across Boundaries of Tradition and Modernity
Love and desire: we experience them with such immediacy, even as we recognize that their contours are shaped by moment, representation, and cultural norms. They occupy a central place in Japanese literature from the earliest poetry, but over the centuries, their representation in various genres also challenged conceptions of literature, gender, and morality. This workshop examines the contentious centrality of emotion, desire, and love in Japanese literary writing across the early modern-modern divide, focusing on their capacity to generate critical debates and to inspire complex gendered representations. Motoi Katsumata examines the reception of the (in)famous Heian poetess Ono no Komachi during the Edo and Meiji periods, drawing upon an array of genres to examine how her legendary reputation as a cruel beauty intersected with changing discourses of sexual morality to ignite debates over her sexual and literary virtue. Daniel Poch explores the clash between early modern and modern conceptions of “literature” within the novels of Natsume Sōseki, asking what consequences the intersection of the modern novel with older, didactic conceptions of literature held for Sōseki’s representation of love, desire, and emotion (ninjō). Together, their papers ask us to rethink our understanding of the divide between Japanese tradition and modernity—both on the page, and in the heart.
Workshop Schedule:
2:30 – 2:45 pm: Welcome Remarks by DAVID ATHERTON (Harvard University)
2:45 – 3:45 pm: Presentation: “Was Ono no Komachi a Virtuous Woman?” by KATSUMATA (Meisei University & Brandeis University)
3:45 – 4:00 pm: Break
4:00 – 5:00 pm: Presentation: “Emotion, the Novel, and Sōseki's Writing of "Literature" in Late Meiji Japan” by DANIEL POCH (University of Hong Kong)
5:00 – 5:30 pm: Wrap-Up Discussion