Composing courtiers : Ki no Tsurayuki's poetic visions of gender, writing, and ritual at the Heian court
by
 
Heldt, Gustav.

Title
Composing courtiers : Ki no Tsurayuki's poetic visions of gender, writing, and ritual at the Heian court

Author
Heldt, Gustav.

ISBN
9780599751699

Personal Author
Heldt, Gustav.

Physical Description
1 online resource (377 p.).

General Note
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 61-05, Section: A, page: 1845.
 
Adviser: Harvo Shirane.

Abstract
This thesis analyzes the relations between representations of gender, the visual rhetoric of written waka poetry, and the political symbolism of various ritual practices at the Heian court as they parallel one another in a group of texts produced by the poet, theorist, and writer Ki no Tsurayuki (d. 946) around the turn of the tenth century CE. Throughout Japan's long history, this period has been seen as a renaissance of indigenous Japanese culture in the form of architectural, calligraphic, painterly, poetic, and "literary" styles of cultural expression at the Heian court.
 
My thesis will argue that these supposedly "Japanese," "feminine," "private," and "aesthetic" achievements were in fact ritual technologies of writing and reading waka which paralleled certain monarchical rites involving the acts of "seeing," and "consuming" the realm. Each chapter attempts to place a specific poetic genre or text by Tsurayuki in its cultural and historical context as gleaned from premodern Japanese and Chinese texts which saw writing, gender, history, and ritual as being intimately interwoven in the cosmological patterns through which the Heian court laid claim to the world.
 
This dissertation will argue that the insistent manner in which gender, writing, and ritual are variously intertwined in all of Tsurayuki's writings does so in a manner designed to make space for this lowly male courtier within a court which simultaneously excluded his person from the predominant rites through which he could imagine himself belonging to a ritual male community at court, while at the same time requesting his services on paper in the creation of that same community.

Local Note
School code: 0054.

Subject Term
Asian literature.

Electronic Access
Click for full text

Added Corporate Author
Columbia University.

Thesis Note
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2000.

Field 805
npmlib ysh


LibraryShelf NumberItem BarcodeCopyMaterial TypeStatus
NPM LibraryXX(210529.1)210529-10011ER*電子書(西文)