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

2022年，我把研究重点放在大冢草子(1875-1910)一案上。虽然她大多被奉为诗人，她的虚构作品也被批评为衍生作品(经常被拿来与她的朋友夏目漱石的作品相提并论)，但我认为她的散文是对她那个时代主流意识形态和美学辩论的讽刺。大冢对艺术周围的道德问题的刻薄批评为她赢得了当代男性批评家的谴责，因为她的作品不符合他们对明治中上阶层女性所期望的公共礼仪。归根结底，无论是大冢的公众形象，还是她后来在日本现代文学中被边缘化的问题，都在很大程度上告诉了我们，她那个时代的女作家在道德上对人与作者之间的身份认同的监管和加强，与她的当代男性作家(如Soseki)可以利用的“不正常的天才”角色所提供的艺术价值形成了鲜明对比。今年，我还开始与ERC的项目“现代化帝国：启蒙、民族主义先锋和非西方文学现代性”(University Of Bologna)密切合作。2023年9月，我们将与其他研究日本和奥斯曼帝国的欧洲学者一起，在早稻田大学布鲁塞尔办事处举办一次共同研讨会。

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.