The Department of History of Art presents Melissa McCormick (Harvard University), who will speak on ”Murasaki and Metaphysics: The Thinking Female Author as Icon ca. 1560” on Wednesday, May 4th at 5:30 pm in Loria B51.
Abstract: Given the status of the 11th century Tale of Genji as Japan’s most celebrated work of fiction and the world’s first novel, studies of paintings depicting its female author in the act of composing her tale are surprisingly few. This paper argues that such paintings of Lady Murasaki, far from being simple emblems of the story’s genesis, provide an untapped source for understanding premodern notions of authorship that gesture toward a nascent theory of the novel. A close look at key portrait icons will demonstrate how such ideas were articulated by situating Murasaki’s creative power within a Buddhist philosophical framework. One image of the author will be shown to unlock other images, revealing Murasaki’s spectral presence hiding in plain sight and opening up new modes of interpretation for sixteenth-century painting.