Shishōsetsu Criticism and the Myth of Sincerity

Thus far we have seen how a literary tradition of equating “serious" writing with nonfiction and a language well suited to the reportive style’s epistemology have nurtured the belief in an author’s "unmediated” presence in the text, especially in a text so clearly autobiographical as the shishōsetsu. This belief has in turn prompted the shishōsetsu’s admirers and detractors alike to appeal to a biographical “pre-text” in establishing the proper context for evaluation. In the eyes of the detractors, shishōsetsu writers were unimaginative gossips whose stories’ very intelligibility depended on a prior familiarity with details of their private lives. In the