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Proust and The Tale of Genji

February 18, 2025 at 10:00:00 PM

Location:

Plimpton Room (133), Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street

About the Event:

Speaker: J. KEITH VINCENT, Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature, Boston University


The Tale of Genji has drawn comparisons to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at least since the first volume of Arthur Waley's translation appeared in 1925. Both massive novels were the life work of their authors. Writing in what Anthony Pugh has called “a roughly spiral rather than a linear way,” Proust and Lady Murasaki wove their narratives in great "undulating patterns," deploying recurrent images to set off resonances across the vast stretches of their own writing and in the time of reading and reception. Both novels explore how, in Raymond Mortimer’s words, “the image of the lover is created by the lover’s imagination.” Both tell of the suffering caused by desire, of the way human beings seek replacements rather than renouncing their earliest loves, and how “everything withers, everything perishes,” including grief itself. Both novels end, but neither finishes, giving the impression that their authors would have written more had they lived longer. And both pay special attention to the weather and the seasons, evoking “the successive music of the days” and how “atmospheric changes awaken forgotten selves.” Finally, both produce in the reader what Kenneth Roxroth called "a state of aesthetic joy, a kind of euphoria of response which very few other works of art can produce." In Japan, where Proust was translated early and often, his work served to awaken an interest among Japanese novelists in The Tale of Genji, while many Japanese Proustians cite their love of the Genji as having informed and intensified their understanding of Proust. In this talk, I discuss these and many other resonances between these two great works written a thousand years apart, and suggest ways in which reading them alongside each other can enhance our enjoyment and shed new light on each of them.


About the Speaker:

J. Keith Vincent teaches in the Department of World Languages & Literatures at Boston University, where he offers courses on Japanese literature, literary translation, and queer theory. He is the author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Japanese Fiction, and the co-editor of volumes of essays on Natsume Sōseki and on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. He has published translations of works by Okamoto Kanoko, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Natsume Sōseki, and others. Recent publications include an essay on teaching The Tale of Genji in Boston, and a book chapter on Masaoka Shiki’s haiku on food. Together with friends, he has just finished reading Proust for the second time and is thrilled to be teaching courses on Proust and on the Genji this academic year. He is currently finishing a book on Masaoka Shiki and beginning a project on Proust in Japan.


For further details, please click here.


Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar Series co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute

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