Global Asian Literary Studies Lecture: Distant Listening
Join Professor Matthew Fraleigh from Brandeis and WLL’s own Professor Dennis Wuerthner in a talk on Japanese sinitic poetry!
Sound is fundamental to most definitions of poetry, a mode of expression often distinguished by the combined emphasis it places upon both sound and sense. But what about poetry written in a language by those who do not speak it? Like their counterparts elsewhere in the Sinographosphere (which includes not only China, but Korea, Japan, and Vietnam), composers of Sinitic poetry in early modern Japan were keenly attentive to prosodic rules, tonality, rhyme, and other features conventionally associated with aurality. Yet such aspects of a poem were usually inaudible in the dominant form of oral performance practiced in Japan at the time: interpretive recitation aloud by kundoku. This talk examines the diverse ways in which early modern Japanese theorists and practitioners of Sinitic poetry grappled with this central issue. It draws predominantly on a range of eighteenth and nineteenth century writings in the “shiwa” 詩話 genre of “talks on poetry,” including treatises specifically addressing the aural features of Sinitic poetry. The paper also looks at how another type of shiwa, lexicons explicating obscure Sinitic poetic vocabulary, also shed light on conceptions of sound more obliquely. What do these writings tell us about how early modern Japanese poets conceived of the linguistic status of Sinitic texts?
