Overall, this course aims to foster awareness, appreciation and understanding of two highly literate and artistic traditions of the East. The course will help students gain introductory knowledge on two seminal Japanese and Persian texts and provides insight into the contemporary reality of these two cultures.
Both Japan and Persia have long and intriguing book-making traditions. Their literature takes the shape of fascinating artefacts, created for both highbrow and lowbrow audiences. This pioneering course brings together unexpected similarities and obvious differences, offering exciting, comparative angles, modern interpretations and hands-on experience of these two rich Eastern book cultures.
We will help you discover how these two book-making traditions integrate different literary genres with the physical artefacts that contain them. Our ten sessions survey these two rich and intriguing artistic and literary traditions. They start with an introductory session on the book history in Persia and Japan, introducing their literary tradition and shaping the background that will allow you to appreciate similarities and differences. The next two sessions will approach selected aspects of these book traditions, emphasising medium (manuscripts, printing), formats (scrolls, codices), calligraphy, ink, paper, illumination, margins, illustrations and pigments. Four sessions will discuss canonical and non-canonical texts in Japan (The Tales of Ise) and a “best-seller” of the Persian literary tradition (The Fables of Kalila and Dimna), of which English translations are available. We will discuss the interaction between these texts and examples of the way they are illustrated. Do the illustrations complement our understanding of the texts, or do they challenge it? Do they visually enhance the written word or do they capture the readers’ attention? Finally, we will have two hands-on sessions with the actual artefacts of both traditions kept in the great rare books collections at the Cambridge University Library, and end the course with a session where both traditions will be “in conversation”.
Throughout the course, we will examine how specific the book-making traditions of these two cultural areas are. We will discover what eventual similarities may tell us about the concepts of books as vectors of literary traditions, and consider how (and why) the urge to illustrate the texts might have been so strong.
