The Tale of Genji: A Quest for the True Heart (original) (raw)
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Narrative Cultures in the Mirror
Narrative Culture 1 (1), 2014
The leading question in this paper is: How can comparative studies escape the self-referential mirages of looking-glass scholarship? The essay examines Claude Lévi-Strauss's interpretation of The Tale of Genji (an eleventh-century Japanese literary masterpiece), then draws a parallel between Lévi-Strauss’s argument and Alice’s famous remark that Looking-Glass House reflects her own home. My point, expressed in terms of the looking-glass metaphor, is that gazing at alien narratives through the prism of home-made typologies amounts to seeing yourself in the mirror; whereas engaging in symbolic translation across cultures is tantamount to going through the mirror and following the twists of metaphorical thought. I examine The Tale of Genji in this perspective.
The Absence of Love and Assertion of Identity: A Scholastic Interpretation of Ukifune
Oftentimes visual representations of literature go beyond simple pictorialization of a textual source and actually inflect a particular reading or critique of the original story. A pair of six-panel screens in the Idemitsu Museum of Art, Tokyo (image 1; image 2) that depict two scenes from the Uji Chapters of Murasaki Shikibu's canonical narrative, The Tale of Genji, engages in a visual critique of its literary source. Dating from the early sixteenth-century (Muromachi period) and attributed to a Kano artist, these screens represent some of the first extant depictions of chapter fifty-three, "Writing Practice" (Tenarai) and chapter forty-eight, "Bracken Shoots" (Sawarabi). The portrayals of these scenes are unique in their focus on female characters and feminine spaces that are independent from masculine influences or association, as well as their numerous references to learnedness, education and the arts.
A comparative, interdisciplinary approach, incorporating both anthropological theories of the limen and feminist literary criticism, brings to light vital aspects of four very different works. This book analyses liminality as a meaningful strategy for social comment and protest in works by Murasaki Shikibu, Marie de France, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Edith Wharton. Negotiating the demands and perils of courtship, their heroines create a form of refuge on the threshold as a way of protesting a female’s bounded body and limited options. Through an innovative juxtaposition of East and West, ancient and modern, and multiple linguistic communities, striking connections in women’s writing are revealed. Embodied Boundaries demonstrates how these authors, despite obvious differences in socio-cultural context, employ strikingly similar images that act to destabilize the prevalent centre/margin paradigm and thereby challenge gendered hierarchical practices based on a damaging imbalance of power.
The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 1984
On the moon, an astronaut holds up his hand and blots out the earth and all its people; or, floating untethered above, sees the earth from a new kind of distance. For me to contemplate him is a form of time travel: In my childhood such visions were a private fantasy; now they are part of everyone's memory. Including my own. The Tale of Genji, one of the first great works of world literature in prose, twice as long as War and Peace, written at the beginning of the eleventh century by Lady Murasaki and translated between 1925 and 1933 into magnificent English by Arthur Waley, takes its place in the mind as dream, fantasy, memory. It is a layering of consciousnesses grounded, even gripped, by its author's awareness of time as a substance. It operates on the reader in much the same way as that astronaut holding out his hand, both actually and in my mind, transcends time and space.
On Women’s Nightmares in Japanese Female Writings: the Forgotten Rebellion
Nightmares, particularly those of women, form a consistently recurring theme and motif in Japanese female writings in the 11th century and from the 19th century onwards. However, the literary theme of women’s nightmares expands beyond a momentary neurological phenomenon: they generally refer to situations of intense sufferings that a woman wishes to escape from, but is unable to. Their evolution in form and content reflects the changes in a woman’s relationship with her patriarchal society and, for some, her suppressed self; their propagation indicate her increasing awareness of her limited situation and her attempt to break out of it. Such a theme, if established and studied, can offer an alternative approach to understanding the social and psychological shift toward gender equality through a particular population that expressively advocates for it: women writers. However, current academic literature has yet to recognize such a phenomenon, at least not systematically. The purpose of this research paper is to establish the theme as an official literary tool among women writers. In this paper, I investigate six significant literary works by Japanese women, including one classic novel and one of its modern adaptations as well as four short stories, to prove that the theme is robust across time. I also offer some broad categorizations of nightmares, but the list is not exhaustive. This paper is based on a strong intuition, and should be considered a precursor paper to further research; the conclusion is open to criticisms and constructions. However, it is my hope to bring forward a potentially important literary device that embodies the interactions between a woman’s reality and her creative processes, which in this case produces not only literature but a social movement – in effect, a rebellion.
Genji Goes West: The 1510 "Genji Album" and the Visualization of Court and Capital
The Art Bulletin, 2003
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