WHEREAL SIGNED

Project "WHEREAL" data sheet

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 Project objective

In the last 20 years, world heritage and world literature have drawn much attention because they represent a convenient framework for visualising and promoting a certain numbers of selected ‘items’ acknowledged as the best achievements of human creativity, in response to a growing interest about foreign cultures. However, the concepts of world heritage—especially the recent declaration of intangible cultural heritage (ICH)—and world literature have been harshly questioned: Is it correct to delegate to an international community that is identified with the cultural elites of developed countries the power to judge and “edit the cultural diversity of the world” such as UNESCO”s list of ICH, or to arrange and create a new canon of “what is literary and what is not” such as in anthologies of world literature? These questions are tied to problems of the ownership of cultural heritage and of authorship of certain literary works that are translated from peripheral languages to hegemonic, international ones. Regarding these problems, the discourses of East Asia and Japan are interesting objects of study not only because they are both ‘peripheral’ from the traditional, Eurocentric point of view but also because their cultural and literary heritage is often older and richer than that of many European countries. This action will allow the candidate to apply an interdisciplinary approach to merge the different debates on ownership and authorship, and to formulate a new definition of ‘literary heritage’ that presents an alternative to the dichotomy of tangible/intangible. The case study will focus on the role of Sinitic writing (jp.: kanbun) in pre-modern Japan as part of the shared cultural heritage of East Asia and its historical development, reception, diffusion and eventual abandonment. This research will stimulate the dialogue on the role of literary heritage among multicultural societies with shared traditions and languages, such as East Asia and the European Union.