Intertexts

R e v i e w s 1 6 9 Workshop” for example, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish argues that Demetria Martinez blurs lines between public and private in her poetry by using large-scale social problems as metaphors for individual experience. According to Mish, “In these poems, there is no qualitative difference between an individual suffering aper¬ sonal tragedy and the planet suffering an environmental tragedy; the difference is only one of scale” (114). Further, Martinez “uses several poetic modes to illustrate the concept that there is no divide between the personal and the political nor between the autobiographical and the communal narrative” (114). Yet, as Jeff Berglund and Monica Brown make clear in “Sin Verguenza: Resisting Body Shame in Real Women Have Curves and Caramelo” familial conceptions of cul¬ tural identity—in this case expectations for sexual behavior and body size—can conflict with those of an individual. Because of its clear discussion of the conven¬ tions of the media its authors discuss (film and novel) and how these conventions are manipulated to showcase the tensions between familial and individual iden¬ tity, this essay is one of the strongest in the collection. For example, Berglund and Brown note that in Real Women Have Curves, whenAna (the protagonist) is told by her mother Carmen that she will never fit into the dress she has been looking at, a“series of medium shots shows Carmen on the left, the dress-form in the middle,andAnaontheleft.Thedressformembodieswhattheymaybeembat¬ tled over: their own particular vision of the ideal woman” (64). The range of material surveyed in the collection, combined with its insistence onthecomplex,changing,andsometimesillusivenatureofidentityformationfor Chicanas/os makes Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernac¬ ularworthwhilereadingforthoseinterestedinChicana/oidentityformationand creative production. However, because the book largely assumes ascholarly audi¬ ence—as evidenced by several articles that cursorily reference theorists without overviews or sustained engagement of their thought—readers unfamiliar with the collection’s theoretical referents are advised to acquaint themselves with these materials in order fully to appreciate the richness of the collection. T E R E Z A M . S Z E G H I University of Dayton Yoda, Tomiko. Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Constructions of Japanese Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke UP , 2004. Tomiko Yoda’s groundbreaking study is afascinating read, not only for scholars of Japan, but also for those interested in modern identity formation and the political uses of literature. In offering afeminist critique of the history of Heian literary studies and deconstructing the modern feminized image of Heian literature. Gen¬ der and National Literature shatters many of the traditional views of Heian writ¬ ing, making it an important contribution to the discourse on the creation of Japanese modernity. I N T E R T E X T S 1 7 0 Yoda intertwines her own analysis of three important Heian texts with chap¬ ters analyzing the history of the gendering of Heian writings within Japanese lit¬ erary studies. Chapter 1presents the views of three well-known eighteenthcentury kokugaku scholars and their efforts to lay the foundations for aview of Heian poetry as feminine—that is, apoetry that expressed true feeling, in con¬ trast to more “masculine” poetry, such as that of the earlier Nara period or verse written in Chinese style. Chapter 2discusses the development of the national uni¬ versitysystemandofkokubungakuattheendofthenineteenthcentury.Yoda decribes how, under the influence of the West, the need to create anative literary canon gave birth to substantial studies of Heian literature. Its purported feminine basiswasreaffirmedascontainingtheessenceofnativeaesthetics,asdistinct from the masculine Other represented by the West and by Chinese cultural influ¬ ences. At the same time, the feminist base was negated and promptly thrust into a larger masculine framework. Since the Meiji period was atime of growing impe¬ rial power, this new national literary canon fit well with rising nationalist senti¬ ments. In Chapter 3, Yoda disputes the widely accepted view of the role of women in the creation of writings in kana, showing that in fact kana was considered a simplifiedcalligraphicstyleandthatitwasusedbybothwomenandmen,rather thanexclusivelybywomen.Toproveherpoint,sheanalyzesoneofthebestknownHeiantexts ,Tosanikki,mostlikelywrittenbyamalecourtieradoptinga femalepersona.Yodaarguesthattheauthordidso,notinordertohaveaccessto kanaasamodeofexpression,buttopresenthisviewsonJapanesepoetrywritten bybothmenandwomen,asopposedtoChinesepoetry,writtenonlybymen. Yodafollowsthisupinchapter4withclosereadingsoffragmentsofTheTaleof Genji,showingthatpreviouscritics(notablyMotooriNorinagaandMasudaKatsumi ) missed the multiple layers of meaning in poetic dialogue, for example, betweenGenjiandhislover,Rokujo...