Beyond Genius: Gender, Ethnicity and Authorship in the Modern Japanese Literary Field

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In 2022, I focused my research on the case of Otsuka Kusuoko (1875-1910). While she has been canonized mostly as a poet, and her fictional works have been criticized as derivative (often compared unfavorably to those of her friend Natsume Soseki), I value her prose as an ironic take on the mainstream ideological and aesthetic debates of her time. Otsuka's mordant takes on moral issues around art earned her the censure of her contemporary male critics, because her works did not conform to their expectations of the public decorum befitting an upper-middle-class woman in Meiji. Ultimately, both the issues of Otsuka's public persona and her subsequent marginalization in the canon of modern Japanese literature tell us a significant amount about the policing and enforcing of the identity between person and author in moral terms that was expected of female writers in her era, in contrast with the artistic value afforded to the "abnormal genius" persona that her contemporary male writers (like Soseki) could deploy.This year I have also started collaborating closely with the ERC project "Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities" (University of Bologna). In September 2023 we will hold a shared workshop at the Waseda University Brussels Office together with other European scholars of Japanese and Ottoman studies.