Thursday, April 24, 2025- 5:30pm, Herter 301
Nina Farizova-Kalamazoo College
In a lingering consequence of the “narrative turn” of the 20 th century, everyone and everything in the Western discourse seem to have a “story.” In this talk, I will argue that human beings are equally capable of narrative and nonnarrative mental states and propose a method of reading literature for psychophilosophical narrativity and nonnarrativity as complementing modes, which are not dependent on, or constitutive of, genre. I develop this method based on two poetic categories in Man’yōshū, the earliest extant anthology of vernacular Japanese verse, compiled in the 8 th century. Both groups—“just relating feelings” and “relying on things, relating feelings”—consist of brief, passionate love poems and thus share the nonnarrative lyric form. The latter, however, are also nonnarrative in the psychophilosophical sense. The former tend to reflect narrative mental states, implying that life itself is a story and relying on master narratives—without constructing a literary narrative. In addition to Man’yōshū, I use the proposed method to read the Russian Symbolist Alexander Blok (1880-1921), whose many poems epitomize the struggle between a narrative outlook on life and a desire to be liberated from narrativity.
Nina Farizova is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese at Kalamazoo College.
She has received a PhD from Yale University and an MA and BA from Moscow University. She works in literary theory and comparative literature, as well as in film and media studies. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming from Adaptation and Diacritics.
Sponsored through the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Program in Japanese Literature and Culture, and the Interdepartmental Russian, Eurasian, and Polish Studies program