Organizer: Rebecca L. Copeland, Washington University, St. Louis
Chair: Marvin Marcus, Washington University, St. Louis
Discussant: Paul Anderer, Columbia University
The journal played a significant role in Meiji Taisho literature, providing both the major conduit through which writers reached readers and the framing structure within which writers presented their literary efforts. The way a journal constructed a readership and brokered a literary voice had tremendous impact on writers and on what they wrote. Given the importance of journalism to the formation of a modern literature in Japan, one might argue that a discussion of Japanese literature cannot (or at least should not) proceed without some consideration of the literary journal. "Periodical Voices: The Journal in Meiji-Taisho Literature" proposes to address some of the issues relevant to literary journalism. (For argument's sake, this panel will focus primarily on literary journals, as opposed to journals of a more popular nature.)
Dr. Marcus, the chairman of the panel, will open with a survey of Meiji-Taisho journalistic conventions, focusing on the way certain journalistic tendencies contributed to a privileging of the personal voice in Japanese narrative. Dr. Miller will continue the discussion by examining the serialized structure of literary narratives in journals. He will argue that the brief, episodic style of narration provided in journals was not a novel development, but one with antecedents in traditional modes of oral storytelling. Dr. Copeland will consider the role journals played in encouraging, on the one hand, a revival of women writers, while on the other hand engineering an image of "woman writer." She will argue that the prominent role male editors and critics played in determining who and what to print, resulted in a female voice that was largely one of male construction.
Dr. Paul Anderer will conclude the panel with a critique of the three papers.
J. Scott Miller, Brigham Young University
One of the more persistent elements of Japanese journalistic structure to survive the turn of the century was serialized narrative. Examples of stories gleaned from Meiji zasshi demonstrate the tendency of contemporary authors to keep their stories brief or to adopt an episodic style of composition, complete with suspensions and recapitulations, that allowed them to take advantage of serialized presentation without sacrificing length.
Although the first periodicals (zasshi) were yet another of a series of Meiji novelties, endemic forms of serialized narrative made them less peculiar than one might initially suspect. Gesaku (comic fiction) of the Edo period was generally published in serialized form, as were Japanese editions of Chinese fiction and other Edo period literary works. Another indigenous narrative art, storytelling, had been an ubiquitous part of the urban scene for at least a century prior to the appearance of zasshi.
Traditional modes of oral storytelling included both short and lengthy tales, the latter often presented as a series of a dozen or more episodes told in installments over the course of several weeks. Considering the similarity between the episodic nature of the Japanese oral tradition and the constraints of the zasshi format, it comes as little surprise that some of the earliest-as well as some of the most successful-zasshi featured transcriptions of oral storytelling. This paper will consider the role these transcriptions played in early zasshi and the importance of their episodic structure in shaping the narrative of subsequent journalistic fiction.
Marvin Marcus, Washington University, St. Louis
The modernization of Japanese literature is typically associated with the gradual assimilation of Western notions of selfhood and Western literary models of individualism and self expression. Less well understood is the role of journalism as a vehicle for the widespread experimentation with styles and forms of personal narrative. My thesis is that the dominant strain of self referentiality in modern Japanese literature owes much to certain journalistic conventions that became standardized in the early 20th century.
My paper will begin with a brief survey of Meiji-Taisho journalistic conventions. I will then discuss the emergence of a journal based "conversational style" (danwatai) that achieved currency within the literary community (bundan). My discussion will focus on the influential literary journal Bunsho sekai and the author perhaps most responsible for privileging the personal voice in modern Japanese literary narrative, Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943).
Rebecca Copeland, Washington University, St. Louis
In a 1908 Shincho article, five male writer/critics chastise women writers for their tendency to "ape" their male betters. "Write like women," they charge "or don't write at all." Although the critics do not specify what constitutes "women's writing," they are clear that it exists and that women who do not conform are to be left "unread." This indictment of women writers is particularly significant when we consider that these five men were in a position to mentor aspiring women writers and were in fact known for their "encouragement" of writing by women. Did these mentors, through their encouragement and criticism, create a "female literature?"
Only a rare writer, such as Miyake Kaho, could gain access to print in book form without first having her work published in a journal. Most women writers (like most male writers) were dependent on journals for publication. And since most publishers, editors and critics were male, women who wished to publish were obliged to write the way a man thought a woman ought to write. But, were the women who wrote under this male guidance fully complicit? Were rebels silenced? Or were they able somehow to subvert the demands of their mentors through "palimpests," by concealing a second reading which erased or undercut the import of the surface narrative?
I will discuss these issues in my paper by focusing on the way male critics in the Meiji period envisioned the "woman writer" in contemporary journals and by reading this image against that which emerged in works by women. Limiting myself to the women who wrote during the last three decades of the Meiji era, I will refer primarily to the journals: Jogaku zasshi, Bungei Kurabu and Shincho.
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