著者

GERLINI Edoardo

出版者

人間文化研究機構 国文学研究資料館

雑誌

第43回 国際日本文学研究集会会議録 = PROCEEDINGS OF THE 43rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE LITERATURE (ISSN:03877280)

巻号頁・発行日

no.43, pp.129-150, 2020-03-26

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The word “Classics (koten)”, invented in the modern period, is often used to indicate the “culture of the past” in contrast with the concept of “modernity”. This use of the word koten reinforces the wrong idea that “things of the past”, being substantially unrelated with the present, are in practice useless to the understanding of issues affecting modern societies. This misunderstanding is probably the main reason leading to the so-called “crisis of the classics” in the last decades.   On the other hand, social processes like the use, re-creation and valorization of the culture of the past in the present have led to the birth and thriving growth of the new academic field of “heritage studies” (Laurajane Smith 2006). Drawing on this new approach, which considers the “things of the past” as a tool to tie past cultures to present identities, I argue that rethinking “classical literature” as a form of “textual heritage” can offer new insights into the debate about the “crisis of classics” today.   To negotiate present identities through dialogue with the past is not necessarily a modern conception, but it is something that always happened in every age (David Harvey 2001, 2008). In the case of Japanese Classical Literature of the Heian period, authors always produced texts―of which literary works were but a subset―through the reading and quoting of past masterpieces, in both direct and indirect manners. But how was the idea of the past shaped in the writing of Heian poets who inherited and reused style and contents from Man’yōshū or the Wenxuan, and how did this intertextuality lead to the creation of a present identity in contrast or continuity with the past?  In today’s presentation I will draw on the idea of “textual reenactment” (Wiebke Denecke 2004) to identify into the text of kanshi and waka collections’ prefaces of Nara and early Heian a specific discursive construction about the past, similar to processes of “heritagization” theorized by scholars of heritage. This paper is also intended as a mid-term result of the three years’ fellowship I briefly anticipated during the 42nd International Conference on Japanese Literature in 2018.