| My dissertation compares Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, ca. 1005) and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596, and 1609). With the "higher narrative" as my key concept, I compare these two long narratives written in the pre-modern ages in the two different cultural and literary traditions. The resulting argument takes two stances. On one hand, I intend to reveal the ideological and cultural strategies to use the pre-modern genres as spokesmen of the ancient genealogy of cultures and literary traditions. On the other hand, by acknowledging the capacity of these higher narratives to become canons of respective literary traditions, I oppose the antifoundational questioning of the inherent value of literary works. For the first perspective, "higher narrative" gives us a new way to discuss genres interculturally. The second argument leads us to see how the "higher-ness" of these two narratives enables us to have a glimpse of literature's ultimate power to overwhelm reality.; Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the way in which the authors define their ambitions in terms of the genres into which they categorize their own works, and, further, the way the authors and critics in later generations inherit those earlier works to veer the literary traditions. I conclude that the retrospectivity of romance and monogatari ("tale" or "narrative") assimilates critical energy into themselves so that they occupy the place of the center of culture.; Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with the endings of Genji monogatari and The Faerie Queene.{09}When these two narratives reach their endings, they make us feel as if the real endings would come in the distant future. The Faerie Queene is ultimately spiritual and therefore inherently endless. It lets us see something larger beyond the horizon of our experience. The enchantment that Genji monogatari casts over us is too strong to wake up from, just as a dream sometimes proves to be more real than reality. We will see how these higher narratives are powerful enough to make us unable to distinguish the real from the fictional. |
