‘Literary Heritage’ and ‘Character’：On the Development and the Presentness of the Image of the Classics

ARAKI, Hiroshi

doi:2023.17.1.43

The Journal of Japanese Language Literature Studies > Volume 17(1); 2023 > Article

Special Issue

Border Crossings: The Journal of Japanese-Language Literature Studies 2023;17(1): 43-58.
doi: https://doi.org/10.22628/bcjjl.2023.17.1.43

‘Literary Heritage’ and ‘Character’：On the Development and the Presentness of the Image of the Classics

Hiroshi ARAKI

Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies

<文学遺産>と<キャラクター> ―― 古典イメージの展開と現代性

荒木浩

国際日本文化研究センター教授。

Correspondence Hiroshi ARAKI ,Email: hiroark@nichibun.ac.jp

Published online: 30 December 2023.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I analyze the cultural contents of Japanese Classics and their images with adapting the two key terms ‘character’ and ‘literary heritage’, both of which I have become interested in recently. I co-edited Volume 4 of the five volumes’ handbook Nichibunken Popular Culture Research Series (2020-2021), The Popular Culture of ‘Characters’：Tradition, Performing Arts, Worlds. In the preface of that book, I wrote on ‘The Popular Culture History of “Characters” and “Worlds”’, where I re-examined the key concept of “characters”. In other academic context, I studied the concepts of ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘textual heritage’ in some joint researches, with a particular focus on ‘literary heritage’. By introducing and adopting both these key terms, here I attempt to analyze the development and the presentness of the classic image and its cultural contents in premodern Japanese literature. As some examples of the above, I shed the light on The Tale of Genji, The Tale of Heike and the work of the poet Bashō in order to identify their relationship with their surrounding literary heritage. As a result, and by reconstructing the concept of ‘readers’, I outline the imaging and development of Japanese classic literature and its modernity.

Keywords: Model Reader, Horizon of Expectations, The Tale of Genji, The Tale of Heike, Bashō

キ―ワ―ド: モデルリーダー, 期待の地平, 源氏物語, 平家物語, 芭蕉