My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge by Michael Shapiro

My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge by Michael Shapiro

In My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge, Michael Shapiro devises a storied diary that views the world through the eyes of an inimitable woman whose being and essence are determined by her superlative and penetrating intellect. Inspired by the great Japanese literature by upper-class women writers of the mid-Heian period, eighty-four masterfully woven sections alternate prose, poetry, social commentary and haiku-like vignettes to tell a fascinating tale of betrayal, revenge and undying love. Cruelly and unjustly exiled, Lady Murasaki, accompanied by her consort, Prince Towa no Ai, is the virtuoso author of learned discourses on the Western literary heritage, especially the Divine Comedy and Provencal poetry. The narrator's skein moves the characters along a topography that has them migrating asynchronously between contemporary California and interwar Tokyo, Budapest and Moscow, ancient Israel and the medieval Romance world, Freiburg and New York, rural Alabama and Vermont. Characters and chronologies are scrambled and reconstituted, real and imaginary events and places commingled, as Lady Murasaki brings her vast knowledge of art and literature to bear on explorations of medieval and Renaissance literature and the labyrinthine fictions of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. Her dialogues engage interlocutors that run the gamut from Satan and Pontius Pilate to Dante himself, as well as a giant humanoid cat. Through it all and to the end, including her final attainment of retributive justice, Lady Murasaki is wedded to Prince Towa no Ai, and it is their real-life love story that animates everything.

Michael Shapiro, the editor, has published widely in the fields of linguistics, poetics, and semiotics. In the application of Peirce's theory of signs to language, his two Sense volumes - The Sense of Grammar and The Sense of Change - have been dubbed instant classics.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781419647536
ISBN 10	1419647539
Title	My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge
Author	Michael Shapiro
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Booksurge Publishing
Year published	2006-09-12
Number of pages	262
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.