| The dissertation weaves together two interconnected layers of inquiry and analysis. At one level, it is a study of tenth- to eleventh-century Japanese literary texts, including Tosa nikki, Kagero nikki and The Tale of Genji, that examines the effects of female discursive agency on the development of sophisticated vernacular narrative during the Heian period. The dissertation analyzes the relations among female narrative voice, gendered socio-cultural attributes, vernacular orthography, and vernacular literary genres, arguing that the female narrator emerged as an indispensable mediator of vernacular discourse and its autonomous linguistic/cultural domain. It also demonstrates that the narrating voice inflected by the speaking subject vastly complicated the self-reflexive mechanism of Heian literary discourse.;At another level, the dissertation attempts to engage with the broader theoretical problem of how to read non-Western, premodern narrative, both through and against our contemporary frame of reference. In particular, it addresses a major dilemma confronting the field of Japanese studies today: the need to question not only the universalism of dominant Western paradigms but also the particularism of nativistic constructions of Japan. Feminist perspectives and agendas offer this project crucial tactics to contest the erasure of "heterogeneity within" that sustains a binarism of monolithic "Japan" versus equally monolithic "West." Heian literature, forged into an icon of the "feminine principle" that supposedly predicates the native culture, provides a strategic site for such a critical exercise. Instead of totalizing Heian narrative discourse under Western or counter-Western frameworks, the dissertation approaches these texts as a series of negotiations that drew and redrew the divisions that define femininity-masculinity, self-other, poetry-prose, vernacular-Chinese writings, and orality-literacy. The dissertation, thereby, attempts to question the link between these highly canonical texts and the positivistic notions of "woman," "Japanese language," and "Japanese literature," assumed in many existing studies of the genre. |
