In the history of modern education there has been much controversy over nationalism, especially in the field of the teaching of literature. There the political subject is often disputed in the form of struggles between spoken and written languages. An instance of such opposition can be found in a remarkable contrast between the report issued in 2004 by the Council for Cultural Affairs and Katsumi Masuda's theory of teaching literature. The former regards writing as a source of spoken language, whereas the latter finds the origin of written language in voices, that is, oral expressions repressed in literary history. As is shown in this article, a possibility of the teaching of literature can be discovered in such opposing discourses on the two sorts of language.
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