Los Angeles, CA 90089

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SUMMARY

This symposium seeks to investigate questions related to canon inheritance, canon formation, and canon disintegration: how do habits of quotation and other episodes of appropriation suggest evaluative judgments about "sources"? How have these practices affected literary composition in the archipelago, composed in Japanese wabun and Chinese-styled kanshibun? A group of specialists will consider these issues across the span of premodern Japanese history.

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Abstract 

Primary to understanding how Japanese writers of Chinese-language poetry and prose envisioned themselves within the grand flow of East Asian literary heritage is what and how they quoted prior texts. Twentieth-century Japanese specialists in shutten-ron, the enterprise of tracking down allusive sources, have done a great deal to clarify which continental texts were materially available in any given period of Japan's history and what patterns of quotation they engendered. But of course not all engagements with prior texts are that of quotation: received works also are studied, edited, interpreted, and re-compiled. Underlying all of these acts are claims, or assumptions, of value. This symposium seeks to move beyond the strictly empirical inventory work of shutten-ron and instead investigate the following questions related to canon inheritance, canon formation, and canon disintegration: how do habits of quotation and other episodes of appropriation suggest evaluative judgments about "sources"? How do engagements with "sources" play out across coexisting, often competitive communities of literati, monastic scholars, and self-styled poets? Within this process, are new canons formed, or simply old ones deformed? As kanshibun composition in the archipelago evolved, how did its practitioners theorize their enterprise? How did they take stock of domestic traditions and how did they situate these in relation to continental analogues? Our event seeks to explore these questions in a wide variety of historical and compositional contexts. We aim to give each presenter 30 minutes to speak and ample time for question and answer discussion.

Participants

Wiebke Denecke, Boston University (Talk postponed until 2016)
"Historical and Continental Awareness in the Saga Anthologies​"
The Saga period is arguably one of the most misunderstood periods of Japanese literary history. Defined negatively as a “Dark Age of Native Poetry” or misjudged, positively, as an age of largely imitative, yet enthusiastic appropriation of continental literary practices, it needs to be reassessed in its nature and significance within Japanese literary history. This talk makes visible the rather distinctive features of the Saga Anthologies and literary production of the Saga period through three comparative angles, namely comparison with Tang Anthologies, comparison with surviving remnants of Silla poetic production, and wa-kan comparisons with Kokinshū Period texts.

Matthew Fraleigh, Brandeis University
"Talking about Sinitic Poetry in Early Modern Japan" 
In 1770, the Confucian scholar and poetry instructor Emura Hokkai (1713–88) published Nihon shishi(History of Sinitic poetry in Japan), the first comprehensive account of Sinitic poetic expression in the archipelago. This five-volume treatise traced shi composition in Japan from its origins at the dawn of literacy to the works of Hokkai’s immediate predecessors in the mid-Edo period. While he drew heavily from earlier anthologies and surveys, notably Hayashi Gahō (1618–80)’s 1665 Honchō ichinin isshu(One poem for each poet of our court), Hokkai aimed to provide his readers with something new: a systematic historical understanding of the development of Sinitic poetry in Japan that was both more attentive to the diversity of its practitioners and also structured by a clear narrative line. Hokkai wrote at a time when Sinitic poetic expression flourished with unprecedented vigor and part of Hokkai’s project was to contextualize the present by taking stock of the past. By considering such issues as the aesthetic criteria Hokkai employed to assess Japan’s Sinitic poetic tradition, the types of comparison he adopted to situate this tradition within a broader regional frame, and the connections he drew to Japan’s vernacular poetic forms, this paper explores what Nihon shishi can tell us about how Sinitic poetic expression was understood by early modern Japanese intellectuals.

Jennifer Guest, Oxford University
"Creating a Non-Specialist Chinese Canon: Chinese sources, women writers, and models of romance in the Heian court"
This talk explores the borderlines where canons of Chinese-style textuality met with other Heian standards of elegant or courtly style; in particular, the way that certain widely-recognized and poetically adaptable Chinese sources (for example, a subset of Bai Juyi’s poetry) played an important role in the creation of new kana-based literature. Which Chinese (or kanbun) sources and motifs were widely accepted and valued in non-scholarly contexts – particularly for use in waka-related literary activity, and in writing by and for women? How was this courtly, non-specialist Chinese-style canon selected and produced, and how did it interact with the ambiguous taboos placed on women's display of literary erudition? What creative developments grew from this interaction? As an entry point for considering these questions, I will focus here on allusions to historical figures filtered through Chinese-style poetic sources; characters like the tragic beauties Yang Guifei and Wang Zhaojun who were adopted as literary topics in a wide range of contexts and contributed to the developing poetics of romance. I will discuss examples from mid-Heian court literature, including the Pillow Book and Japanese and Chinese-style Wakan rōeishū (Chanting Collection), and then finish with a look at how stories about these figures were later incorporated into the world of waka pedagogy (for example in Toshiyori zuinō). By examining the kinds of Chinese-style allusions that could most readily cross imagined social boundaries linked to written style, I hope to consider the nature of those boundaries as well as the creative potential of overlapping textual canons in Heian literary culture.

Kōzō Kawai, Brandeis University/Kyoto University
"Reading Du Fu and Yamanoue no Okura through the Lens of Tao Yuanming"
Though Yamanoue no Okura (660?–733?) and Du Fu (712–770) lived in the same age, they had no contact with one other. Nevertheless, we can find many common points in their works. When they write about poverty, for example, they do not exalt it by emphasizing the pureness of the impoverished condition. On the contrary, they exaggerate the misery of poverty, making abundant use of humor to laugh at their own poverty. They are also able to imagine other people’s poverty through their own. Moreover, we further find that they often write about their own children. These features are peculiar to them and very rare in other poets of their age. Why do they have such common characteristics? One way to account for these similarities is to consider the existence of Tao Yuanming (365–427), whose work stands alone in Chinese poetry for its unique exploration of these themes. In this paper, I argue that the shared features of Okura and Du Fu’s literature derive from Tao Yuanming. In Japan, it is often said that Tao Yuanming was not accepted by Man’yō poets, but I think Tao’s work had been spread rather earlier and that poets like Okura and Du Fu absorbed his uniqueness.    

Ivo Smits, Leiden University 
"Lotus Meditation in a Boat: Renzen and the Landscape outside the Capital in the 1140s"
This presentation will center around the travel poetry of a fairly unknown but quite prolific late Heian kanshi poet, known as ‘the monk Renzen’ or ‘Lotus Meditation’ (Shaku Renzen 釈蓮禅, 1082?-?). Active in the first half of the twelfth century, he has been nicknamed ‘the Saigyō of Sino-Japanese poetry’ because of his extensive travels. His most substantial legacy is indeed a long sequence of poems made on a journey to Kyushu in the early 1140s. I will use this sequence to illustrate a number of assumptions about Sino-Japanese poetic practice and networks in the twelfth century Japan. One such assumption is that composition in Sino-Japanese offered poets great thematic freedom. Related to this is a discernible creative interest in a world outside court society. Another assumption is a program of cultural codification of landscapes and their representations. Finally, a third assumption is that networks of poets could include poets who no longer discernably functioned within the usual parameters of the scholar-bureaucrat-poet.

Brian Steininger, Princeton University
"Monzen and Mongols: The Classical Canon in a Time of Crisis"
The curriculum of the early State Academy (daigakuryō) drew on Tang models and a particular vision of the role of scholarship and literature in the imperial state. As the structure of governance repeatedly shifted from the twelfth century onward, the value of that curriculum was subject to repeated reevaluation. This paper focuses on one incomplete manuscript of a canonically central text, the literary anthology Wenxuan (Jpn. Monzen, c. 526), to investigate the value and application of the Academy curriculum in a new world far from the Academy. The manuscript in question, now privately held by the Japanese imperial household, contains a colophon linking it to Adachi Yasumori (1231-85), one of the most powerful vassals in the Kamakura shogunate. The colophon is dated to 1280, the year before the second attempted Yuan invasion severely tested the military leadership of the Kamakura government, and just a few years before Yasumori himself was assassinated in the bloody “Midwinter Coup.” What need was there for a collection of centuries-old belles-letters in this context? This paper mines the fragmentary evidence of Yasumori’s life in Kamakura to show that his interest in the classical canon was not fleeting, but a core aspect of his career, and attempts to reconstruct the lived experience of the classical canon outside of the traditional scholarly houses, arguing that such a text could serve as a multi-layered locus of educational, ritual, and utilitarian value.

Akiko Walley, University of Oregon
"Negotiating Sources: Visual Canons and the Principle of Salvation in the Ōta Haiji Reliquary Set"
In Buddhism, veneration of the bodily relics of the religion’s founder, Sakyamuni, defined the religion. Similar to other aspects of Buddhist practices, devotees on the Japanese archipelago took cues from preceding examples on the Asian continent in their relic worship. The container types, materials and configurations of Buddhist reliquaries on the Asian continent, however, varied vastly from one set to another, providing – from the perspective of the Yamato practitioners – an impossible array of visual “canons.” Focusing on the seventh-century reliquary set discovered from Ota Haiji (太田廃寺, Osaka prefecture), this presentation explores the consequences of such multiplicity in the sources of inspiration. A close examination of the Ota Haiji reliquary set reveals that rather than embarking on the impossible task of choosing a single “canonical” mode, the creators of this reliquary set instead adopted the loose underlining principles that can be found across the diverse models, while simultaneously echoing to the conventions of their own domestic funerary practices.

Glynne Walley, University of Oregon  
"Audition: Chinese Vernacular Fiction and the Logic of the Yomihon"
This presentation examines Kyokutei Bakin’s early 19th century yomihon Nansō Satomi hakkenden as an adaptation of the Chinese vernacular novel Shuihu zhuan (J: Suikoden; The Water Margin), and thus as a representative example of the early modern Japanese reception of Chinese vernacular fiction. The 19th century Edo yomihon presented itself to readers as a localization of Chinese vernacular fiction – it offered readers both a familiarization of a foreign fictional mode and a defamiliarization of Japanese-language narrative. In doing so, it reverses the original logic of Chinese vernacular fiction, which was predicated on the idea of speaking to readers in a familiar language. This presentation will explore the linguistic and presentational strategies by which Bakin brought readers an experience of the foreign, positioning Hakkenden as a key late stage in a process of reimagining Chineseness that can be traced back to Ogyū Sorai and other early 18th century Japanese Confucianists.

Jason Webb, University of Southern California 
"Buddhism from the Outside: Bonmon Poems of the Early 9th Century"
During the seventh, eighth, and early ninth centuries Yamato literati borrowed from Wen xuan all manner of poetic equipage: diction, topics, genres, even theories of poetry’s value. Going still deeper, they referenced the conceptual architecture of Wen xuan, that is, the set of principles and terms by which its early sixth-century compilers structured their diverse materials into an inclusive, coherent anthology. The phenomenon of referencing Wen xuan’s organizational paradigm grew especially prominent as canon building emerged as a Heian court priority during the ninth century. Compared to its predecessors, Bunka shūrei shū (second of the early Heian anthologies, completed 818) made fullest use of Wen xuan’s terminology in its table of contents: Excursions, Banquets, Parting, Exchanges, History – the list goes on. And yet, among these imported building-blocks of canonicity appropriated by Shūrei shū compilers appears one with utterly no continental precedent as such:bonmon, used as a term to collate 10 poems that in some way or another relate to Buddhism. How exactly to assess this “deviation” from the canonical norms Wen xuan established and that Shūrei shūcompilers otherwise so meticulously observed? Wherein lay the compulsion to include – and thus codify as canonical – such a category? In pursuit of these questions, this paper investigates the tenbonmon poems of Shūrei shū, considering their contexts, perspectives, function, and perceived value.

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