Interpreting Traditional Japanese Poetry: Text, Context, Intertext

Abstract

Reader–Response and other reader-centered criticism is applied to the field of Japanese Traditional Poetry (waka 和歌) with the aim of investigating the ways in which the presentation of poems affects their interpretative possibilities. Firstly, the formal properties of the text are analyzed in terms of style and poetic devices. Secondly, the social genesis of the poems is described in terms of their social significance, the use of poetry as the default way of communication, and particularly the extended practice of presenting the poems together with explanatory headnotes (kotobagaki 詞書), often of narrative nature, describing its genetic occasion. A theoretical distinction between theme, topic, and occasion leads to a deeper analysis of these narrative possibilities seen in the anthologists’ and playwright’s choice to create new narrative contexts or to purposefully eliminate them. As a conclusion, it is shown how the friction between the text itself and its given context underlies every act of reading waka, as a source of interpretative possibilities of great aesthetic fertility.