Ethnographies of modernity: Nakagami Kenji's counter-history of national literature (1968--1983)

With the 1975 publication of the novella The Cape (Misaki), fiction-writer Nakagami Kenji began to re-write the system of indigenous Japanese literature (kokubungaku) by re-writing the narrative operations of its foundational myths, beginning with the Kojiki. This dissertation analyzes three modes in which Nakagami used the term of monogatari to organize this alternate cosmology. Monogatari holds together ideas of language, property rights and political sovereignty in Nakagami's cosmology of fiction and criticism. Conventionally associated with classical literature, the signature properties of monogatari ---articulating collective enunciation, displaying polysemic inter-textuality, and retaining traces of orality in written accounts---prove equally useful for connecting modern issues of linguistic representation to political representation in ways that self-consciously graft and extend prior rhetorical styles and contexts.; Each chapter demonstrates how monogatari allows Nakagami to talk about seizing the means of signification in the public sphere. Monogatari accounts for the narrative operations and social legibility of a group of people who have contributed to the making of a national archive of literature, yet were not granted the status of historical subjects---residents of the modern hisabetsu buraku. I locate four moments of linguistic sovereignty within which the emerging contours of Nakagami's cosmology become meaningful. "Linguistic sovereignty" designates the process of seizing the means of signification in order to further the goals of collective political self-determination in a symbolically-mediated public sphere.; Chapter 1 introduces the category of a "people's intellectual property," and shows how national identity is composed by claiming family members as protagonists of modernity in Oe Kenzaburo's fiction. Nakagami's early stories, in contrast, highlight narrative operations as the means of dis-possession from the public sphere. Chapter 2 situates Nakagami's stories of dis-possession in the particular historical character of nineteen-seventies discourse on the buraku, and the rhetorical traditions of buraku activism. Chapter 3 discusses the cosmologies of Claude Levi-Strauss and William Faulkner as models for the "fieldwork" in monogatari Nakagami undertakes through essays of ethnographic reportage. Nakagami's fiction shifts from viewing language as a totalizing performance of power, to conceive a socially-embedded process which assumes the reader of monogatari as a co-producer of meaning.