CJS Thursday Lecture Series | Visible Rhymes, Inaudible Echoes: Script and Sound in the Sinitic Poetry of Modern Japan

Through the turn of the twentieth century, Sinospheric intellectuals were bound together by their membership in an intraregional literary culture. Even as a full range of vernacular forms developed and thrived in premodern East Asia, literary Sinitic works continued to flourish: stimulating and in turn being stimulated by vernacular works. But whereas such texts moved relatively unproblematically across the region, the sound associated with such texts varied widely. This talk explores the implications of aural variation for a literary form in which the sound of words is especially privileged: poetry, focusing on Sinitic poetry from Japan’s nineteenth century.

Matthew Fraleigh is Associate Professor of East Asian Literature and Culture at Brandeis University. His research concerns the literature of early modern Japan, especially kanshibun (Sinitic poetry and prose). He is the author of Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern Japan (Harvard, 2016).