Style, Discourse, and the Completion of the Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature

• Main Author: Lee, Jacob Zan Adachi
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2013
• Subjects: discourse; genbun itchi; literary history; Mushakō; ji Saneatsu; Shiga Naoya; style; Takamura Kōtarō; Classics; Comparative Literature
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3629; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4628&context=etd

Many histories of modern Japanese literature see the "completion" of the modern vernacular style in the writings of Shiga Naoya (1883--1971), Mushakōji Saneatsu (1885--1976) and Takamura Kōtarō (1883--1956). Why and how this critical-historical perception of stylistic normalcy arose and still continues is better understood, I propose, through a close reading of key texts that identifies instances and patterns of creative manipulation of-as opposed to mere determination by or complicity with-certain philosophical, social, and historical discourses.How this creative manipulation plays out varies in prose and poetry and from text to text. In Mushakōji's Omedetaki hito (1911; The Simpleton), temporal and generic transitions establish a doubled discourse of sincerity that normalizes the genbun itchi prose into the background. In Shiga's An’ya kōro (1921--37; A Dark Night's Passing), certain syntactical and lexical innovations construct a new and rigid model of intuitive interiority. Takamura's Dōtei (1914; The Journey) reverses, to its own literary historical advantage, gendered discourses on the Japanese language and Japanese literary history.