Yisheng Tang

唐藝晟トウ・ゲイセイ

PhD Student in Japanese

with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

University of California, Berkeley

Curriculum Vitae

About Me

I am Yisheng Tang, a PhD student studying early-modern and modern Japanese literature, with a designated emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

I received my B.A. in Comparative Literature and Japanese with a minor in German from the same institution in 2019.

I am currently interested in exploring the question of “friendship” and the history of sociability in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, as well as the changing boundaries between homoeroticism and friendship and the notions of theatricality and affect in those periods’ literature.

Other things I enjoy include ancient histories, mystery fiction, music, and works of manga and animation.

Recent Projects

Japanese Studies

The “Lyrical” Spectator: Poetry as Ritual in Kakinomoto no Hitomaro’s Elegies (banka)

This thesis focuses on Kakinomoto no Hitomaro’s elegiac poems (banka) in the seventh to eighth-century Man’yōshū, Japan’s oldest extant anthology of vernacular verse. It explores the multiple layers of “spectatorship” in the poems and perceives the lyric as a technique and advocates for an approach that questions the seemingly immanent lyrical qualities of poetry and understands them in their historical contexts, to understand the need to be “lyrical.”

The Narrative Voices in Temae miso

This project examines the subjects Nakamura Nakazō chooses to present and the way he approaches them in the chapters on the 1855 Ansei Earthquake, offering preliminary thoughts and arguments on how Nakamura Nakazō’s various styles emerge from generic influences as well as his experience in the world, which is deeply grounded in his interaction with the historical and social moment he is situated in (i.e., the natural and political disasters he experiences as well as his recognition of his role as an actor).

Bridging the Ritual and the Lyrical: “Spectators” in Hitomaro’s Banka

Constructing multiple layers of observation, the poet unfolds private love and grief and constructs an emotional realm shared by all observers and observees, in which the lyrical and the ritual are tightly intertwined. This allows for the formation of a meta-community that embrace the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary.

Authorship and the Depiction of Interiority: The Birth of “Modern Japanese literature”

This project explores the development of notions of authorship and the interiority of fictional characters across the Meiji-Edo divide. It focuses on Edo writers such as Santō Kyōden (1761-1816) and Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848), and the early Meiji writer Ozaki Kōyō (1868-1903), hoping to developing a new genealogy of the foundation of “modern Japanese literature” in the Meiji period.

Kyokutei Bakin, the Author, and His Work, Fūzoku kingyoden

This project focuses on Bakin’s role as a “conscious” author, his project of naturalizing foreign fictions into Japanese culture, his discussion on language (classical language versus contemporary language, vernacular language versus the language of high register), as well as his experiments with his characters in Fūzoku kingyoden.

Filiation and Affiliation: A Meiji Homosocial Relationship in Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro

This project aims to explore the wider range of erotic possibilities in Kokoro by paying particular attention to watakushi’s perspective without presupposing the division of homosexual and heterosexual desires. Such a reading will allow us to reconcile the seemingly incompatible schools of reading Kokoro, and provide a new perspective for understanding Kokoro’s place in the Meiji discourse on sexuality.

Quelling Blurring: “The Tale of Shuten Dōji” and Its Interpretations

Instead of creating a sharp division between monsters and humans, “The Tale of Shuten Dōji” in Otogi-zōshi blurs these two identities, creating a new dynamic between them by questioning the very distinctions between these groups established by humans. The new relation between the humans and the monsters then allows us, among other things, to read the story as contemporary commoners’ satire and criticism toward the privileged warrior class.

Comparative Literature and Other Studies

A New Theory of Tragedy: Reading Le Cid through the Notion of Time

This study proposes to read Pierre Corneille’s 1636 play Le Cid not through the tragic conflicts between opposing passions but through the notion of time. In Le Cid, time is an active autonomous agency that exerts control over the characters’ passion and action; the mortal characters’ awareness of time’s “divine” power and the struggle between them and time is a source of tragic consciousness. This reading can lead us to a new understanding of early-modern tragedy.

The Entanglement of Two Relationships in Henry Suso

This essay examines how, in The Life of the Servant, the believer’s devotion to God can be situated in a network of relations (i.e., the relationships with God, with other believers, with laypeople, and with oneself). By focusing on Suso, we can see if the social aspect of the concept of “friends of God,” which became concretely communal toward the end of the fourteenth century, already has its hidden presence in mystical texts that seem to be heavily grounded in the theological and “exclusive” tradition of the “friends of Gods.”

Mirrors and Portraits in Schiller’s The Robbers

To understand how “friendship” becomes a site where the configuration of the self takes place, this project examines the “mirroring” function of friends and uses Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading to understand how subjective metaphorical constructions such as “portraits” and “narratives” shape one’s judgment of the objective reality.

The Notion of “Closure” in Isabelle de Charriére's Trois femmes

TThe lack of closure of the narrative structure, the enforced unconventional closures on the plot, as well as the intimate homosocial bonds between women, can be understood as signs of resistance to the conventional social order imposed on women. However, the omnipresent male voices that are hidden beneath the dominant female voices in the work suggest a more nuanced relationship among women, men, and the social system they live in.

Public and Private Love: the Representations of Eros in Sappho’s Poetry and Plato’s Symposium

This project focuses on Sappho’s fragment 1 and fragment 94, as well as Phaedrus’ and Pausanias’ speeches in Symposium. It aims to uncover the different models of Love in these poems and accounts, which involve the relationship among the lover, the beloved, and the society they live in. The rhetoric of Love can be used both to deny human subjectivity and to advocate for subjectivity.

Examining Blurring: An Anti-anthropocentric Comparative Study of European Vampirism and Shuten Dōji

In drawing attention to the fact that monsters and humans do become one, and to the ways of how the borders blur and why they blur, “The Tale of Shuten Dōji” in Otogi-zōshi Polidori’s “The Vampyre” offer us insight into questions of desire and legitimacy, but also of the distribution of power in the social and historical contexts the stories were written in.

Academic

"Student" and "scholar" are the most important identities of mine. Here you can find the record of my academic activities

Non-academic Engagements

I am also interested in applying the skills and knowledge I acquire as a student and scholar of literature to fields outside the academia