BOOK TALK AT DONALD KEENE CENTER
Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki's Tosa Diary as History and Fiction
Friday, September 27 at 6:00 p.m.
Columbia University – Kent Hall, Room 403
Admission: Free
The Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University kicks off the 2024–2025 academic year with a book talk by Gustav Heldt, professor of Japanese literature at the University of Virginia.
This talk will outline several unique insights into Heian Japan provided by Ki no Tsurayuki's Tosa nikki (Tosa Diary), which is ostensibly the record of an ex-governor's voyage back to the capital kept by an anonymous woman in his entourage. The resulting split between fictional female narrator and historical male author has usually led Tosa nikki to be viewed as either the first Heian woman's memoir or the last aesthetic manifesto of one of the Japanese poetic tradition's foremost figures. In lieu of these narratives, it will be argued that the diary merits attention for the discursive practices, representational conventions, and non-elite social contexts it illuminates.
Preregistration is required by noon on Thursday, September 26. Click here for the Google Form.
About Gustav Heldt
Gustav Heldt specializes in the language, literature, and cultural history of Japan prior to contact with the West, with related interests in gender, poetics, narratology, ritual practices, comparative historiography, and myth. At the University of Virginia, he regularly teaches courses such as Survey of Japanese Literature and Introduction to Literary Japanese, as well as seminars on more specialized topics such as Japanese myth, the Tale of Genji, Japanese court women's literature, and medieval warrior tales.
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