What has always intrigued me most in Japanese literature are the patterns: patterns that link cultural norms to fictional narratives, classical works to modern lit and women authors to male writers of previous generations.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, as I start this blog?), my interests did not mesh well with the publishing norms of academia. Pursuing the patterns that intrigued me would have required too much time (to meet publishing deadlines) and, in my mind, too much academic drudgery. A couple of conversations with grad school mentors come to mind here: 1) that I couldn’t understand classical Japanese lit without knowing ancient Urdu; and 2) that I couldn’t write on any modern Japanese author without reading everything they had written, in the original Japanese.
But although these patterns did not segue well with an academic research agenda, they proved extraordinarily useful in teaching. For forty years, I witnessed college undergraduates (at Berkeley, IU Bloomington and DePauw) and adult learners (at IU’s Teaching East Asian Literature in the High School Workshop) using these patterns to develop their own sophisticated readings of Japanese lit. Even more exciting, their insights were by no means “one and done.” Instead, they could take these patterns and apply them on their own to new works. My students became self-motivated learners.
One of my favorite podcasts, History Hit’s “Not Just the Tudors,” recently aired an episode on Francesca Ceccina, the most famous (and well paid) musician at the early 17th-century Medici court. Since most of “XXXX”‘s works were composed as ephemera, for specific public occasions. few remain to us. Such also is the fate of much material that percolates up from the needs of teaching.
My goal here is to explore some of the most useful patterns I’ve discovered in more depth than allowed by
the ntroductory teaching classroom setting. In some cases,
an introductory classroom teaching format. In some cases, the approach will be more esoteric, such as my exploration of how psychoanalysis, and its idea of free association, shaped Shiga Naoya’s work into the world’s first example of stream-of-consciousness writing. At other times, it will be highly controversial: for example, my theory that Murasaki Shikibu’s endlessly elegant narrative, The Tale of Genji, in fact revolves around a Heian period “dirty joke.”
Whether the patterns on this website strike you as plausible or impossibly far flung, I invite you to use them as tools to read the text–and see what you think.
The proof, in my mind, is in the using.
Their efficacy, in my mind, is in the using.
My goal in this blog is two-fold. One, to introduce some of the patterns that I found most useful for teaching. Two, to explore some of the patterns that have been floating around in my head for many years that were inappropriate for classroom teaching. On the one hand,
