What role do books and other textual products play in the constitution of the cultural identity of people living in multicultural and complex societies? Is it possible to redefine classical and premodern literature as "textual heritage", and what does it means?
The WHEREAL project was aimed at opening a new area of inquiry where literary studies – especially those related to premodern sources – and heritage studies could meet to foster a deeper understanding of how past cultures impact present societies, and how the past texts and classical literary works are understood, used, and recreated to answer present social needs, for example concerning issues of cultural identity or the consolidation of shared and authorized memories. The project, that was rooted on the experience of literary studies and area studies, with a focus on premodern East Asian and Japanese literature, wanted to challenge the academic community of both literary and heritage studies, proposing a new theoretical category of “textual heritage” to be debated and used by other scholars in Japan and worldwide.
Texts are one of the clearer witnesses of how people of the past thought and felt about their cultural heritage, and they constitute at the same time a cultural asset themselves, like precious manuscripts or books being conserved into archives and museums. But unlike other forms of cultural products like painting or statues, texts are necessarily encoded into a specific language, that marks that text as belonging to a specific country, ethnic community and people. Language is indeed one of the most distinctive characteristic of the so called “national identity”, but the example of Sinitic writing (=classical Chinese) in premodern Japan makes this assumption both complex and inaccurate, as Japanese literary history is characterized by an extremely strong diglossia between Japanese (wabun) and Sinitic (kanbun) that continued at least up to the early 20th century, determining many aspects of linguistic and literary forms of Japan today.
To understand how people of the past, even in a non-european country like Japan, thought and negotiated their cultural identity through the use, conservation and recreation of texts, is a very powerful tool to rethink and relativize western-centered assumption about the transmission of textual sources – like the so called “Classics” – and the management of past memories and culture.
The WHEREAL project is important for the world society, and the European society in particular, because it fosters the understanding of the role of literature and writing in the consolidation of cultural identity, stimulating public debates on how to promote respect for cultural diversity in the 21st century Europe, intended not as a group of nations, but a lively multicultural and trans-national environment.
The overall objective of the research was to provide a definition of “textual heritage” in order to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue about ownership, authorship, authenticity of cultural goods and the management of past, both as physical embodiments like books and manuscripts, as well as intangible knowledge of reading, writing and translating. The proposed study of the discourse on heritage and Sinitic writings in Japan provided the opportunity to reflect on these issues from an external, more objective point of view.
