Engaging with the Trans-East Asian Cultural Tradition in Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese Literatures, 1880S-1940S
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Afterlives of the Culture: Engaging with the Trans-East Asian Cultural Tradition in Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese Literatures, 1880s-1940s The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Hashimoto, Satoru. 2014. Afterlives of the Culture: Engaging with the Trans-East Asian Cultural Tradition in Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese Literatures, 1880s-1940s. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064962 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Afterlives of the Culture: Engaging with the Trans-East Asian Cultural Tradition in Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese Literatures, 1880s-1940s A dissertation presented by Satoru Hashimoto to The Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts August 2014 ! ! © 2014 Satoru Hashimoto All rights reserved. ! ! Dissertation Advisor: Professor David Der-Wei Wang Satoru Hashimoto Afterlives of the Culture: Engaging with the Trans-East Asian Cultural Tradition in Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese Literatures, 1880s-1940s Abstract This dissertation examines how modern literature in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries was practiced within contexts of these countries’ deeply interrelated literary traditions. Premodern East Asian literatures developed out of a millennia-long history of dynamic intra-regional cultural communication, particularly mediated by classical Chinese, the shared traditional literary language of the region. Despite this transnational history, modern East Asian literatures have thus far been examined predominantly as distinct national processes. Challenging this conventional approach, my dissertation focuses on the translational and intertextual relationships among literary works from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and argues that these countries’ writers and critics, while transculturating modern Western aesthetics, actively engaged with the East Asian cultural tradition in heterogeneous ways in their creations of modern literature. I claim that this transnational tradition was fundamentally involved in the formation of national literary identities, and that it enabled East Asian literati to envision alternative forms of modern civilization beyond national particularity. ! iii ! The dissertation is divided into three parts according to the region’s changing linguistic conditions. Part I, “Proto-Nationalisms in Exile, 1880s-1910s,” studies the Chinese literatus Liang Qichao’s interrupted translation and adaptations of a Japanese political novel by the ex-samurai writer Shiba Shirō; and the Korean translation and adaptations of Liang Qichao’s political literature by the historian Sin Ch’aeho. While these writers created in transitional pre-vernacular styles directly deriving from classical Chinese, authors examined in Part II, “Modernism as Self-Criticism, 1900s-1930s,” wrote in newly invented literary vernaculars. This part considers the critical essays and the modernist aesthetics of fiction by Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu, and Natsume Sōseki, founding figures of modern national literature in China, Korea, and Japan, respectively. Part III, “Transcolonial Resistances, 1930s-40s,” addresses the wartime period, when the Japanese Empire exploited the regional civilizational tradition to fabricate the rhetoric of the legitimacy of its colonial rule. This part especially explores the semicolonial Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren, and the colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers Kim Saryang and Long Yingzong, who leveraged that same civilizational tradition and the critiques thereof, in order to deconstruct Japanese cultural imperialism outside of nationalist discourses. ! iv ! For Yunju, Sophia, and Sage ! v ! Acknowledgements My deep gratitude goes to Professor David Wang, my advisor and mentor. His generosity, open-mindedness, and scholarly rigor have never failed to welcome me bringing burgeoning and unarticulated –– and often misconceived –– ideas about my research. The pleasure of having those innumerable meetings with him, filled with critique, thrill, wit, and joy, throughout my years at Harvard is beyond measure. I thank Professor Karen Thornber, whose scholarship has helped transform my research from a national into a comparative project. My discussion owes much to her meticulous and incisive feedback. I am privileged to extend my thanks to Professor David Damrosch. The many exciting conversations with him have guided me to touching upon fundamental questions of literature in general through the paths of East Asian texts. For his encouragement and help, I thank Professor Leo Lee. The serendipitous encounter with him in Taipei opened to me a whole new landscape of what can be done in humanistic studies. Furthermore, I am indebted to my teachers and friends in the US, Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, and around the world, for their encouragement, inspiration, and friendship throughout this project. Without their unflagging support, this project would not have been born. And finally, to my wife Yunju, thank you for being a firmest supporter and a sharpest critic of my work. She, and our children Sophia and Sage, enable me to explore not only what I study, but also why. With love, I dedicate this work to them. ! vi ! Table of Contents General Introduction Part One: Proto-Nationalisms in Exile, 1880s-1910s Chapter One Universality, Particularity, Exemplarity : Liang Qichao’s Interrupted Translation of Chance Meetings with Beautiful Women Chapter Two Excavating the Future: Sin Ch’aeho’s Imaginary Historiography and His Translation of Liang Qichao’s Three Italian Nation-Building Heroes Part Two: Modernism as Self-Criticism, 1900s-1930s Chapter Three Transculturation in Transition: Modernism as Self-Criticism in Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu, and Natsume Sōseki (I) Chapter Four Aesthetics and Morality: Modernism as Self-Criticism in Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu, and Natsume Sōseki (II) Part Three: Transcolonial Resistances, 1930s-1940s Chapter Five Cultural Specters: Zhou Zuoren in Wartime East Asia Chapter Six Transnational Allegory: The Intertextualizations of Lu Xun’s Short Stories in the Late- Colonial Works of Kim Saryang and Long Yingzong General Conclusion Bibliography ! vii ! General Introduction Topologies of World Literature In The World Republic of Letters, one of the seminal studies of world literature, Pascale Casanova distinguishes three structurally different phases in the genesis of modern literature as a world system. The first, she argues, came in the mid-sixteenth century, when the French Pléiade poets reinvented vernacular French as a literary language by appropriating the tradition of the secular Latin; the second came in the late- eighteenth century with the “Herderian revolution,” which founded literariness upon the nation’s popular tradition; and the third in the wake of post-World War II decolonization, which engendered postcolonial literature.1 By elaborating on the 1970s literary system theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s literary sociology, Casanova’s “distant reading” has illuminated the function of modern literature as constituting what she calls “the world republic of letters,” a universal aesthetic institution independent of the political or economic power of the states.2 In one of her few comments on East Asia, Casanova mentions modern Japanese literature as an example of the “national literature” created according to the Herderian paradigm.3 Her view reflects the widely shared notion in research on modern East Asian literature that each country of the region, starting in the mid-nineteenth century when modern concepts of civilization were introduced from the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p.47-8. 2 For “distant reading,” see: Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature.” 3 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p.106-7. ! 1 ! West, created a national literature based upon its particular national tradition. An in- depth exploration of the history of the development of modern literature in East Asia, however, not only puts into question the legitimacy of such conventional understandings, but, more importantly, the essential theoretical premise that underpins it. Casanova’s mapping of world literature is based on the orthodox framework of the Hegelian dialectics of the universal and the particular, in which the universal value of “literariness” is constantly defined, challenged, and reestablished in the struggles for recognition of the particular creative practices of individual authors. In the “world republic of letters,” it is writers and critics in Western Europe –– especially in Paris, the “capital” of the “republic” –– who represent and defend the universal value of literariness, while artists of the nations on the peripheries are the ones who continue to create novel literature and redefine that aesthetic value. It would be possible, to be sure, to some extent to criticize this scheme as Eurocentric –– or Paris-centric, if you will4 ––; however,