SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

The anecdotal mode of discourse in classical Japan

Abstract

“And so it has been handed down.”  In creating and shaping a way of learning in late classical and early medieval Japan (ca. 1100-1300), “stand alone” comments to and remarks about texts and authors became the basis from which a new canon of knowledge was built.  They are typical of the pattern of scholarship transmitted throughout the classical and early medieval periods.  This transmission often took the form of collections of seemingly pointless anecdotes, a group of texts that modern scholars tend to lump together under the rubric of “setsuwa”.  It is the anecdotal quality of this particular mode of commentary we should regard as an essential element in transmitting established attitudes towards texts, knowledge, and literature n traditional Japan.  They constitute an important form of commentary and were intended to be instructive as well as entertaining.
This paper will take a look at this particular template of intellectual discourse and commentary and in this way will sketch how literary perception and knowledge were given shape in traditional Japan.

Speaker Biography

Ivo Smits is Professor of Arts and Cultures at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He studied at the universities of Leiden, Cambridge and Tokyo, as well as Waseda University, and was Visiting Associate Professor at Yale University. He teaches literature and film in Japan, and specializes in traditional Japanese literature, esp. classical court poetry in both Japanese and Chinese. His research focuses on issues of multilingualism, socio-political contexts and questions of imagination in relation to texts and poetic practices of premodern literature in Japan.

Publications include: “China as Classic Text” in Tools of Culture (Association for Asian Studies, 2009), “The Way of the Literati: Chinese Learning and Literary Practice in Mid-Heian Japan” in Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), “Teika and the Others: Poetics, Poetry, and Politics in Medieval Japan” (Monumenta Nipponica 2004).