The Tale of Genji, written by the Japanese woman Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 1000), is one of the most sophisticated works of literature in the world. It uncannily anticipates all of the richness and psychological complexity associated with the eighteenth-century novel. And yet to view this premodern Japanese text according to anachronistic categories or presentist viewpoints is to foreclose on its ability to expand interpretive possibilities and to consider alternatives to standard narratives of literary history. 

This course examines the prose and poetry of Genji critically and on its own terms, paying close attention to the tale’s philosophical and religious foundations, intertextuality and classical language, and the historical issues at its core, from court politics and hierarchies, to gender and class. We will also be attuned to the pleasures of the text, from the richness of its character development, and the evocative descriptions of its storyworld, to the ingenuity of its plot structure. As the oldest and most substantial work of women’s writing in the world, The Tale of Genji can also be meaningfully placed within that historical framework. The course will consider how Genji can be read from a feminist perspective, how gender dynamics operate in the tale, and how notions of the romance genre and gender have shaped perceptions of the tale into the twenty-first century.

Importantly The Tale of Genji has an intertwined textual and visual/material history. In this course we will think with images, calligraphy, manuscripts, and artifacts, using them in a reciprocal relationship with the text to arrive at new understandings of the tale and its reception.