Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

Graduate Student, Department of Asian and North African Studies

PhD candidate

Thesis Title: INTERTEXTUAL STRATEGIES IN RE-WRITING THE MODERN CANON:PARODY, PASTICHE, TRANSLATION IN JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

About

The overall aim of my research is to investigate whether and, If so, how the use of intertextual tropes like parody and pastiche have been a determining factor in the “translation” of the modern canon in contemporary Japanese literature.
In Postmodern critical debate, much attention has been drawn to the strategic use  of intertextual practices in contemporary literary production. 
Indeed, parody - often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or allusion, without any proper distinction - is usually considered central to Postmodernism, both by its detractors and its defenders.
Because of the “critical difference” by which parody has re-coded and subverted the past - and shown the potentialities of a new reading of the canon, this particular trope has been elevated in Anglo-European literary scholarship as a hallmark of the postmodern aesthetic.
As far as the Japanese context is concerned, a larger attention has been drawn to the frequency of allusion and intertextuality in the historical development of arts and literature, but it remains widely unrelated to distinctions between simple pastiche, allusion, and parody in their critical sense.
Quite paradoxically, probably because of this ubiquity of intertextuality in classical literary forms, the Japanese contemporary critical debate on the distinctiveness of postmodern parody has not been as trenchant as in the Anglo-European scholarship.
My assumption is that in Japanese contemporary context, the most salient reflections on the “critical difference” established by postmodern ways of using intertextuality has been achieved by the parodies’ and pastiches’ authors themselves.
To prove it, I will take into consideration the metatextual works of very eclectic writers like Ogino Anna (荻野アンナ, 1956), Shimizu Yoshinori (清水義範, 1947) and Inoue Hisashi (井上ひさし, 1934), who all show a great inclination towards “de-doxifying” – to use a favourite term of Hutcheon’s – Japanese literature and her relationship to the past.

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