Genji: The Penguin Classic Edition

Please allow me to enthuse about the edition of The Tale of Genji that I have ordered through our university bookstore.
Penguin has an exceptional website devoted to this edition alone, and I can't possible do any better than to simply encourage you to go there and be introduced to its glories for yourselves.
The cost, I believe, is about fourty dollars for a book that is as bibliographically beautiful as it is artistically superlative.
Often, of course, choice between editions is a matter indifferent. In this particular case, however, so much rests on the skill and artistry of the translator, and -- oh joy! -- Royall Tyler has surpassed the hopes of even the most optimistic Genjiphiliac.

• About the book itself, click here.
• About the translator, click here.
• A brief essay of welcome from Royall Tyler is here.
• E-text of the book's Introduction, arranged as hotlinks to each section, is here.
• Chapter One, in portable document format, allowing you to see the beauty of the layout, is here.

Early Reading

To start your reading for the term, pick up John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly -- hardly more than a short story. The second text in the Rutgers edition -- Montreal-born Winnifred Eaton's A Japanese Nightingale -- is available to be read voluntarily as your individual research may indicate as the term progresses.

I am interested in hearing your responses to Madame Butterfly uncouloured by prior lecturing from me.

Then, on to the first section of The Pillow Book -- "In Spring it is the Dawn" -- and the first chapter of our main text, The Tale of Genji, titled "The Paulownia Pavilion." The chapter, by the bye, can be read online in pdf format, here. It is my hope that you will find Shonagon and Shikibu both very delightful reading.

A word here about the volume of reading. Despite what it may seem, you will find it very manageable. Madame Butterfly and Masks are very short texts. The Pillow Book is comprised of short episodes, which we will read sequentially as the term goes on. As for Genji, while it does have heft, we are concentrating this term on the first two-thirds of the book - the chapters that follow the life of "the shining prince". I have a schedule for us to follow week-by-week that puts the book in effective portions over our thirteen weeks togther.

But above all, I am confident that Genji is such a wonderful book, that the atmosphere and culture of historical Japan is so appealing, that Lady Shikibu is an author of such high stature in among the world's literary greats, and that the opportunity to perhaps add to the wider appreciation of the book promises excitement, so it will be a delight and no chore at all.

Comment answered

To answer Raymond's comment, Genji is an absolutely wonderful book, and it's very enjoyable to read -- particularily for someone, like Raymond, interested in Japanese culture, ancient or modern. If you are going to begin reading over the Christmas break, let me recommend that you take it slowly. Read the introduction, and then read a chapter and reflect on it for a day or so.
During the course, we'll read the book easily and for appreciation-- that is, as a Japanese would: in the spirit of the one Western literary genius who, with his sister Dorothy, perhaps shares Shikibu's sensibility:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.

Course Outline

ENGLISH 394
WORLD LITERATURE IN ENGLISH II:
Japanese Women Writers: Æsthetic of the Erotic Politic
SPRING 2006

One of the supreme works of world literature, and plausibly regarded as the world’s first novel, is the genji monogatari by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Written in the tenth century at the Heian court in Japan and at a length great than War and Peace, Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji is nonetheless almost immediately accessible and perfectly delightful to modern readers– Japanese and Western both. In this course, using the superb Penguin Classics Deluxe translation by Royall Tyler, we will take a groundbreaking approach to Shikibu’s work. We will approach the text as an elaborate expression of a singular Japanese female eros by means of which the Lady Shikibu creatively represents in the fictionalized life and legacy of her “shining prince Genji” a normative standard of male virtue and behavior that directly resists the warrior militarism of the nascent samurai upper-caste. More than this, Shikibu – with a unique command of the æsthetic potentiality of Japan’s landscape, folklore, fashion and high culture – delivers a new literary form that contributes through subsequent centuries to the development of the Japanese artistic and intellectual systems known as wabi and sabi.
Additional readings will support our approach to The Tale of Genji. Extracts from Shikibu’s contemporary and rival Sei Shonagon and Enchi Fumiko’s short 1958 retelling of an episode from Genji will put Shikubu’s Japanese influence in context. And John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly – the source for Puccini’s opera as well as (more recently) the Miss Saigon operetta – along with Winnifred Eaton’s A Japanese Nightingale, will suggest that Genji suffered appropriation as mere exotic material for re-interpretation within Western imperialist conceptions of the Orient.


This course will be blogged at http://talesofgenji.blogspot.com

REQUIRED TEXTS:
Shikibu, Murasaki The Tale of Genji Penguin
Shonagon, Sei The Pillow Book Columbia
Enchi, Fumiko Masks Vintage
Long, John Luther Madame Butterfly Rutgers
Eaton, Winnifred A Japanese Nightingale Rutgers


COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
10% Class Participation
10% Research Presentation
20% Group Project
20% Term Paper (approx, 2500 words)
40% Final Paper (approx. 3500 words)

Welcome

Check back before the start of term for course information.