Part 2 of introduction to The Tale of Genji with bilbiography of Edward Seidensticker’s essays on the novel

Introduction to the Tale of Genji with quotes from Edward Seidensticker’s essays on the novel

In this course, students will analyze texts that Americans have treated as “scripture.” Students will read texts that present themselves as scripture, such as selections from the Book of Mormon and a Holy Sacred and Divine Roll and Book (a Shaker text). They will also read texts that have attained a sort of canonicity within American culture, such…[Read more]

The Gospel of John is not unique in representing Jesus as performing miracles, but the way that John uses signs to point to Jesus’s Christological identity stands out among the canonical gospels. In John, when Jesus is called χριστός—Christ, messiah—it is often in the context of a sign being performed. However, the relationship between Jesus…[Read more]

The poetry of Teimuraz I’s marks a turning point in Georgian literary history. From 1629–34, the poet-king of Kartli and Kaxetia (eastern Georgia) undertook to produce a Georgian equivalent to Niẓāmī Ganjevī’s famed quintet (khamsa) that stands as one of the major achievements of classical Persian literature. While Teimuraz I imitated the form…[Read more]

Have you ever thought about the language you speak? If the answer is yes, surely you might have wondered: Where does my language come from? How does it change? What are its relationships with other languages? How do its literary and cultural production reflect such evolution and connections? In this course we will approach classic works of Spanish…[Read more]

371 is an introduction to canonical works of Early Modern Spanish. This semester, we take a novel approach to the reading and interpretation of masterpieces of Spanish literature to revisit the notion of canon, and to challenge standard disciplinary approaches that constrain Spanish and Portuguese within the boundaries of national literary and…[Read more]

Spanish 260.001 is a methodological introduction to Hispanic Literature. We focus on three specific genres, Narrative, Poetry and Drama, and the course’s goal is to equip the student with the practical abilities to analyze a literary text in Spanish as well as with a basic knowledge of the major historical trends in Hispanic literature from its o…[Read more]

This paper seeks to explain why Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People constitutes a valid historical work, rather than a religious text. It starts by addressing the nature of historical vs non-historical narrative, focusing on a concept of “genealogy of information.” It couples ideas from narrative theory, historiography, and…[Read more]

This chapter describes the creation of “America’s Public Bible,” an interactive work of digital scholarship that identifies quotations of the Bible in U.S. newspapers. The chapter explains how the project works from a computational perspective and, more importantly, how those computational methods connect to research questions in American…[Read more]

The proliferation of TV fiction can be partly explained by TV producers attuning their products to draw audience’s attention. Narratives of love dominate the plots and almost always the good is pitted against the evil, rich against the poor – ultimately the good always wins. The formula may be clichéd, but in places where news of war, te…[Read more]

What can a body do? is a central question to religious thinking: What does it mean to be human? To be non-human? What is a human body? Where are its limits? What can a religious body do differently? This question of the body is one way to begin an inquiry into what it means to be human, and religion is one way to think about the limits of…[Read more]

Though many studies of contemporary Buddhist literature exist, such studies often limit their purview to canonised, ‘high-brow’ authors. In this article, I read Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Japanese Corpse, a detective novel, for how it portrays Zen Buddhism. I show that The Japanese Corpse portrays Zen as non-dualist and amoral: good and bad a…[Read more]

An attempt to think about authorial strategies of dislocation and relocation in 1 Peter. First presented at a conference on Early Christianity and its urban environment held at St. Mary’s University in Twickenham, England, 2015.

Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site…[Read more]

The Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics by the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) has been treated by commentators as wide-ranging as Borges, Renan, and Kilito as an exemplary case of the failure of translation. Critics who presume Ibn Rushd’s failure often concentrate on his rendering of Aristotle’s tragedy and comedy by praise…[Read more]

This dataset was produced as part of the Research Workshop on China’s Local Gazetteers, Computerized Data Analysis and Visualization, held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin, August 1-19, 2016. Fulltext data from 11 local gazetteers (fangzhi 方志) was processed to find instances of religious buildings (temp…[Read more]

This thesis compares the recent rise and decline of two political uses of cultural tradition, one in India and one in Singapore. In India, the thesis examines the Hindutva (Hindu-ness) movement, which became influential in the 1980s and 1990s. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads India’s current coalition government, arose from the Hindutva m…[Read more]

This dissertation examines the idea of ethical revaluation — taking things we normally see as good for our flourishing and seeing them as neutral or bad, and vice versa — in the Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva. It shows how Śāntideva’s thought on the matter is more coherent than it might otherwise appear, first by examining the consistency…[Read more]