FY2016 JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship (Short-term) for North American and European Researchers

Dr Poch, Daniel Taro   (Principal Investigator (PI))

Professor Toeda Hirokazu   (Co-Investigator)

9

2016-09-01

306000

FY2016 JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship (Short-term) for North American and European Researchers

JSPS

Others - Humanities and Arts

PE16001

JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship (Short-term) for North American and European Researchers

2016

Completed

My research project investigates the significance of discourses and narrative practices surrounding emotion (ninjō) and desire (jōyoku) in the production of literary writing over the early modern-modern divide in nineteenth-century Japan. Notions of emotion and desire marked discussions on the nature of literature from before the Edo period (1600-1868) well into the Meiji period (1868-1912). Discourses surrounding emotion also lie at the heart of major genres in nineteenth-century Japan, such as late Edo-period yomihon (books for reading) and ninjōbon (books of human feeling) as well as the Meiji-period novel (shōsetsu). My project examines how these discourses shape nineteenth-century Japanese literary writings by negotiating the fundamental ambiguity of ""literature"" (bungaku) as a medium that represents potentially transgressive emotions and desires while simultaneously claiming social and even political significance. I seek to uncover, across the radical transformations that characterize the transition from Edo to Meiji, the hitherto unexamined continuity of textual and discursive negotiations over the ambivalent nature, function and status of literary writing, which underlie the emergence of modern literature in nineteenth-century Japan.