JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025
The Japan Studies Lunchtime Speaker Series welcomes all for a lecture and discussion with Dr. Gustav Heldt on his new monograph, Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary as History and Fiction.
Drawing on both contemporaneous historical sources and modern literary criticism, Navigating Narratives offers unique insights into Heian Japan through a close reading of one of its most enigmatic and consequential texts. Named after the province once governed by its creator, Ki no Tsurayuki (d. 946), Tosa nikki (The Tosa Diary) purports to be the record of a voyage kept by an anonymous woman in the entourage of an ex-governor returning to the capital. This split between fictional narrator and historical author has usually led readers to place the diary in narratives privileging one of those two figures, with the result that Tosa nikki has been valued primarily as either the first Heian woman’s memoir or the last aesthetic manifesto of a man whose writings shaped the Japanese poetic tradition for centuries afterward. Navigating Narratives attempts to steer away from the anachronistic assumptions and author-centric readings informing these accounts. By focusing instead on the diary’s reception as a parody by its earliest readers, Heldt argues that it merits attention for the discursive practices, representational conventions, and non-elite social contexts it illuminates as the world’s first short novelistic work of fiction.
This talk is free and open to the public. No registration is required.
Date & Time:
Wednesday, November 27, 2024 | 12:30pm – 2:00pm
Location:
CK Choi Building, Room 351, 1855 West Mall, Vancouver
Speaker
Gustav Heldt is a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on early Japanese mythology, Heian vernacular narratives, waka poetry and poetics, and Japan’s larger place in early medieval global history. His publications include a monograph on the connections between ritual, community and authority in early Heian waka poetry (The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan, Cornell East Asia Program, 2008), a translation of the earliest surviving Japanese narrative (The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters, Columbia University Press, 2014), a co-edited collection of essays about cross-cultural connections in early medieval Eurasia (China and Beyond in the Mediaeval Period: Cultural Crossings and Inter-regional Connections, Cambria Press, 2014) and a monograph on the earliest extant vernacular Japanese diary (Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary as History and Fiction, Harvard Asia Center, 2024).
