Khari’s Reviews > Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People > Status Update

I can't make too hard of a judgment, because I've never read anything written during the Meiji era in Japanese, I doubt I could, but this certainly isn't true of modern literature. So at what point did the status switch?

This actually disagrees with other works in this volume that talk about how honorific endings are required in writing..so..? Is this just historical? She certainly doesn't frame it as such.

"Polite and honorific verb-ending forms, which formally indexed context-bound relationships between the author and the reader and between the author and the characters, eventually lost their status in the serious literary style."

Again. Examples? That would be nice.

I can't believe I found this article convincing in grad school.

first of all she said that by the 1910s plain verb endings such as -da had won out as the established literary style.

Maybe it had in the 1910s, but it certainly isn't now. And where is the evidence that this is true? She doesn't give a single example. No excerpts. No surveys. Just her feelings.

I just read the world's most rambling paragraph and am sitting back in astonishment at how my younger self found post structuralism to be convincing.

Just because you redefine commonly understood words to mean something completely different doesn't rescue you from inherently circular arguments.

This particular author seems to think that governments and institutions are a) a lot more competent and efficient than they actually are and that b) they use those powers to effect structured social change...

I think she overestimates them.

"Women's language is also a national issue, a reflexive parameter of civil order and of social change. Nationwide opinion polls are regularly conducted on whether "women's language: is becoming corrupted and how much so; national sentiments over its perceived disappearance are thereby crystallized and circulated in the form of numbers and statistics."

Oh. I should clarify, this book is also beautifully cited, I'm just reading it as research rather than as non fiction, so it wasn't in my mental category of 'nonfiction.'

Anyway.

"Japanese women's language is a socially powerful truth. I mean by this not that the phrase refers to the empirical speech patterns of women. Rather...it is a critical cultural category and an unavoidable part of practical social knowledge