Past Events
Events Calendar
Location: Comparative Literature Seminar Room Academic Building 4052 (15 Seminary Place)
Abstract:
“Saikaku - Bakin: Exploring continuities and discontinuities in early modern narrative in Japan”
Recent scholarship on Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693) and Takizawa Bakin (1767-1848) has illuminated the literary influences, social contexts, and readership of the two authors who bracket the Edo period. Less apparent are the continuities and discontinuities in those influences, contexts, and readerships across the period encompassing approximately 250 years from the 16th to mid-19th centuries. Both authors created stories populated by characters on the margins of Edo society: the demimonde of the pleasure quarter and kabuki theater or the mercantile ethos of the shopkeeper in the case of Saikaku; the outlaw world of social outcastes or defiant rebels in the case of Bakin. Yet, their fictions emerge from starkly different literary contexts; Saikaku’s literature gets its voice from oral story-telling and haikai poetics, whereas Bakin’s speaks in the language and mindset of Chinese vernacular fiction.
9:00am Paul G. Schalow, Rutgers University - OPENING REMARKS
9:30-10:15 Daniel Struve, Paris Diderot University - A GENEAOLOGY OF SAIKAKU'S UKIYOZOSHI
10:30-11:15 William Hedberg, Arizona State University - LOCATING BAKIN WITHIN CHINESE NARRATOLOGY
11:15-12:00 DISCUSSION
12:00-1:30 LUNCH By individual arrangement
2:00-2:45 David J. Gundry, University of California, Davis - CENTER & PERIPHERY IN SAIKAKU’S TALES FROM THE PROVINCES
3:00-3:45 Glynne Walley - BAKIN, SAIKAKU, AND THE LIFE STORY OF POPULAR FICTION
3:45-4:30 DISCUSSION
4:30-5:00 Paul G. Schalow, Rutgers University - CLOSING REMARKS