![]() ![]() We will then look at some of the love affairs described in the Genji Monogatari itself. ![]() ![]() We will also look at the literary antecedents of the Genji Monogatari, focusing especially on the treatment of love in the court poems known as waka. After discussing some of the main theories about romantic love, we will first look at the development of the aristocratic concept of love in Heian Japan, considering the social, religious and cultural background. The Eastern text will be Murasaki Shikibu's famous Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji c.1010) and the Western one will be Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1595?). In this course, we will use two famous literary texts to explore the different traditional ideas of romantic love produced by two very different cultures, one Eastern and one Western. Is romantic love a universal phenomenon or does it vary from culture to culture? Moreover, are traditional ideas of romantic love, whatever the culture, the same as modern ones? Cultural historians and anthropologists have different theories on these questions, some emphasizing the biological bases of romantic emotions and others emphasizing the cultural construction of the notion of romantic love. ![]()
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