「日本文学」から「東アジア文学」へ トランスナショナル研究を目指して

Abstract

Since the collapse of the Japanese Empire following the end of World War II, research on modern Japanese literature has been reduced to focusing solely on literature within the Japanese domain, almost as though to say that a period of imperialism had never existed. The same can be said of research on literature from so?called ‘woeji’ (external territories) or ‘Japanese language based literature’. In fact, literary research has been synonymous with spatially internal ‘pure Japanese literature’, predominantly in the hands of permanent residents who have never had the need to go beyond the Japanese mainland. The result of such a situation may be seen as forgetting the traces of various mixtures created by the Japanese Empire. However, as there exist, to this day, various manifestations of traces stemming from the empire and the modern/contemporary cold war period, it cannot be said that modern and contemporary literature has been fully understood as a result of the national literary research mentioned. It is also one of the reasons for the need to begin to focus on aspects that have been forgotten and erased from such permanent resident centered research. In this sense, there is a need to transcend literature pertaining to various single nations, and to establish a broader concept of ‘East Asian literature’.