Playing selves: Tracing a performative textual subject in Sarashina Nikki.

摘要

This dissertation focuses on the circulation of performative textual subjective voices within Heian female writing. I analyze and interpret Sarashina Nikki (c. 1060) within its historical and political contexts in the later half of the Heian period to investigate the blurring of narrative and authorial bodies, and the implications of such acts of ambiguity on the text and the reader.; This study encompasses various aspects of Heian material life such as religious travel, strategic emotional alliances and the politics of marginality, all of which are manifest in nikki literature. I seek to examine these events and processes through the lens of performance and study the records of the same as a double performance: involving reinscriptions of earlier performances and the politics of erasure or edited, self-representation that is attendant upon such staging of life and selfhood. In studying the political import of textual maneuvers within the context of nikki literature, I engage contemporary theoretical concepts outlined by Judith Butler and Gilles Deleuze in an attempt to reinterpret body politics and becoming a self in a classical Japanese context.; I focus on the issue of performative subjecthood in the writings of female courtiers and the fluidity of boundaries between genres such as monogatari and nikki that is explored by Heian writers towards articulating an assertive female subjective voice. In studying a textual performance I emphasize the effect the staging of a crafted self might have upon the material bodies of the reader and the author, both of whom, regardless of other sexual, familial or courtly roles, remain connected to the figure of the performative narrator through their mutual desire for the text.