November 21-22, 2008
The symposium seeks to explore the connection between a variety of Japanese literary works (waka, Buddhist tales, diaries, and avant-garde poetry) and their materiality as manuscripts, handscrolls, albums, and illustrated books. One underlying assumption is that the close study of literary artifacts reveals something about the texts that cannot be understood in reproduction. In one sense this approach emphasizes the importance of primary materials and the belief that encounters with original works can lead to new insights into the texts themselves.
With this theme in mind, the symposium participants will each focus on a single artifact of Japanese literature, in most cases, an object housed in the collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library and the Sackler Museum of Art in the Harvard University Art Museums.
The symposium papers will be divided into three panels, the first focusing on “The Materiality of Classical Japanese Literature” with papers on rare manuscripts in the Sackler collection: a Tale of Genji manuscript, a copy of Fujiwara Teika’s diary The Record of the Clear Moon (Meigetsuki), and the imperial poetic treatise Yakumo mishō compiled by Emperor Juntoku (1197-1242). A second panel on “Religion and Pictorial Narrative” will consist of four papers by scholars of premodern Japanese literature, focusing on Buddhist literature and setsuwa, or short tales, and their pictorialization in the emaki format. While the third and final panel of the conference, “The Book as Object,” will explore the art of the Japanese book, from sixteenth-century Nara e-hon and later woodblock printed books to late twentieth-century book design.
Sponsors:
The Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies
The Harvard University History of Art and Architecture Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Innovation Fund
National Institutes for the Humanities, National Institute of Japanese Literature (人間文化研究機構 国文学研究資料館)
