Dartmouth Events

"A Comparative Reading of Genji and Proust" - a public lecture by Keith Vincent, Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages & Literatures at Boston University.

The Tale of Genji has drawn comparisons to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at least since the first volume of Arthur Waley's translation appeared in 1925. Both massive novels were the life work of their authors. Writing in what Anthony Pugh has called “a roughly spiral rather than a linear way,” Proust and Lady Murasaki wove their narratives in great "undulating patterns," deploying recurrent images to set off resonances across the vast stretches of their own writing and in the time of reading and reception. Both novels explore how, in Raymond Mortimer’s words, “the image of the lover is created by the lover’s imagination.” Both tell of the suffering caused by desire, of the way human beings seek replacements rather than renouncing their earliest loves, and how “everything withers, everything perishes,” including grief itself. Both novels end, but neither finishes, giving the impression that their authors would have written more had they lived longer. And both pay special attention to the weather and the seasons, evoking “the successive music of the days” and how “atmospheric changes awaken forgotten selves.” Finally, both produce in the reader what Kenneth Roxroth called ""a state of aesthetic joy, a kind of euphoria of response which very few other works of art can produce."

J. Keith Vincent is Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages & Literatures at Boston University. He is the author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Japanese Fiction, and the co-editor of volumes of essays on Natsume Sōseki and on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. He has published translations of works by Hamao Shirō, Okamoto Kanoko, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Natsume Sōseki, and Sei Shōnagon. Currently, he is completing a book on the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki and beginning a new project on Marcel Proust and Japan.

Sponsored by the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages with funding from the Dean of the Faculty.