Leading Scholar on Pre-Modern Japanese Literature to Talk at CU
The Center for Asian Studies is very pleased to partner with the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities to invite Professor Haruo Shirane to the University of Colorado Boulder for a public lecture on Friday, October 10.
Haruo Shirane is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Japanese literature, including Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho.
This lecture is based on his latest book, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (Columbia University Press). Elegant, courtly representations of nature and seasons fill a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and prose fiction to screen paintings, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and annual observances. Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this occurred and the manner in which it intersected with a non-aristocratic representations of farm villages and rural landscape to create the complex cultural landscape we have today in Japan.
The lecture will be held at 5:00 p.m. in Humanities 250.