{"id":13145,"date":"2021-03-01T21:02:31","date_gmt":"2021-03-02T02:02:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/?p=13145"},"modified":"2021-03-08T08:24:54","modified_gmt":"2021-03-08T13:24:54","slug":"13145","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/2021\/03\/01\/13145\/","title":{"rendered":"Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan, with Takeshi Watanabe (Wesleyan Univ.) March 5, 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0<\/span>BU Dept. of World Languages and Literatures\u2019<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span>New Books in East Asian Literature<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0lecture series<\/span>, as part of its \u00a02020-2021 theme \u201cKinship, Sexuality, and Emotions,\u201d is pleased to present<\/span><\/p>\n

Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Takeshi Watanabe (Wesleyan University)<\/h3>\n

Friday, March 5, 2021 5:30-7 pm ET<\/span><\/h2>\n

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Please register for the event through the following link: https:\/\/bostonu.zoom.us\/meeting\/register\/tJwqf-GgrDkqH9RPSWTiuhv64tkNmCetVpcJ<\/a>

<\/span><\/p>\n

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ABSTRACT:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes<\/a> (Eiga monogatari)<\/em>, there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales<\/em> is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women\u2019s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji<\/em>, inspired Eiga\u2019s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga\u2019s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji<\/em> to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers\u2019 journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales<\/em> reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Takeshi Watanabe<\/strong> is an associate professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. He received his B.A. in 1997, and his Ph.D. in 2005 in pre-modern Japanese literature from Yale University. He taught as Visiting Assistant Professor at Connecticut College from 2007-2014, and at Wesleyan University from 2012-2014. His current book project is on representations of food and consumption in pre-Edo Japan. He is also starting a translation of The Tale of the Hollow Tree<\/em>, which contains descriptions of banquets and is one of the earliest, lengthy monogatari<\/em> predating The Tale of Genji<\/em>. Although he is pet-less now, he likes corgis and, similarly, likes to eat.<\/p>\n

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** New Books in East Asian Literature is a forum to explore issues, concepts, and theories related to the study of East Asian literature. We are not only asking how to study East Asian literature beyond the paradigm of area studies, which originated from and is still often being linked to Cold War politics, but also seeking to look beyond the Euro-centric frame of traditional comparative literature. In other words, how can we decolonize the study of East Asian literature?\u00a0
<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0BU Dept. of World Languages and Literatures\u2019\u00a0New Books in East Asian Literature\u00a0lecture series, as part of its \u00a02020-2021 theme \u201cKinship, Sexuality, and Emotions,\u201d is pleased to present Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan Takeshi Watanabe (Wesleyan University) Friday, March 5, 2021 5:30-7 pm ET   Please register for the event through the following […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7613,7617],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13145"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13210,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13145\/revisions\/13210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}