Voices of the Past : : The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse / / Naoki Sakai.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Sakai, Naoki,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1992
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (368 p.) :; 2 b&w illustrations

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Naoki Sakai maintains, a radical change took place in Japanese discourse—the sudden emergence of multiple new possibilities of conceptualizing the world. In this brilliant and searching reinterpretation of the cultural history of the Tokugawa period, Sakai traces this shift across a spectrum of artistic and critical texts from puppet theater to Confucian commentary. He asserts that during this time a new emphasis was placed on textual performance, practice, and communication, and he illuminates its ethical and political consequences.Sakai draws upon the insights of recent critical theory as he explores the historical consciousness of texts and the self-consciousness of language itself. Analyzing the conditions of discourse formation, he seeks to suggest how language may be used to inform historical investigation. He first considers the Confucian philosopher Ito Jinsai's critiques of Neo-Confucianism. Showing how the historical other was constructed and theorized, Sakai discusses key works of visual art, performance pieces, poetry, and wakun, a genre of graphic translation. Finally, he considers writings representative of intellectual movements that began to construct the identity of the Japanese language and culture.Intellectual historians, specialists in Japanese culture, anthropologists working with historical texts, literary theorists, linguists, philosophers, and others interested in East Asian thought will welcome this rich and challenging book.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Theoretical Preliminaries -- Part I. Silence at the Center: Ito Jinsai and the Problems of Intertextuality -- 1. Change in the Mode of Discursive Formation -- 2. Ito Jinsai: The Text as the Human Body and the Human Body as the Text -- 3.Textuality and Sociality: The Question of Praxis, Exteriority, and the Split in Enunciation -- Part II: Frame Up: The Surplus of Signification and Tokugawa Literature -- 4.The Enunciation and Nonverbal Texts -- 5.Supplement -- 6.Defamiliarization and Parody -- Part III. Language, Body, and the Immediate: Phoneticism and the Ideology of the Identical -- 7.The Problem of Translation -- 8.Phoneticism and History -- 9. The Politics of Choreography -- Conclusion -- Appendix. Japanese and Chinese Terms -- Index