Modernist Fiction, Its Origins and Beyond... and other stuff

Please join us for a discussion and read through of Junichiro Tanizaki's novel the Makioka Sisters. Please read Pages 327-422 of Book 3 for this Meetup.

Junichirō Tanizaki’s magisterial evocation of a proud Osaka family in decline during the years immediately before World War II is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century and a classic of international literature.

Tsuruko, the eldest sister of the once-wealthy Makioka family, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The shy, unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family’s exacting standards, while the spirited Taeko rebels by flinging herself into scandalous romantic alliances and dreaming of studying fashion design in France. Filled with vignettes of a vanishing way of life, The Makioka Sisters is a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family—and an entire society—sliding into the abyss of modernity. It possesses in abundance the keen social insight and unabashed sensuality that distinguish Tanizaki as a master novelist.

Amazon Purchase Link:
https://a.co/d/00zE1fct

Please join us for a discussion and read through over the next several weeks of René Girard’s A Theater of Envy. Please read Chapters 3-4 for this Meetup.

In this ground-breaking work, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics turns to the major figure in English literature, William Shakespeare, and proposes a dramatic new reading of nearly all his plays and poems. The key to A Theater of Envy is Girard's novel reinterpretation of "mimesis." For Girard, people desire objects not for their intrinsic value, but because they are desired by someone else - we mime or imitate their desires. This envy - or "mimetic desire" - he sees as one of the foundations of the human condition.
Bringing such proocative and iconoclastic insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night's Dream from the status of a chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book abounds with novel and provocative interpretations: Shakespeare becomes "a prophet of modern advertising," and the threat of nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a brief, but brilliant aside in which an entirely new perspective is brought to the chapter on Joyce's Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus gives a lecture on Shakespeare. In Girard's view only Joyce, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, comes close to understanding the greatest of Renaissance playwrights.

Throughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare, Girard's prose is sophisticated, but contemporary, and accessible to the general reader.

Amazon Purchase Link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1587318601?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Arden Shakespeare Third Series Edition Amazon Purchase Link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1408133490?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Arden Shakespeare Second Series Edition Amazon Purchase Link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1903436605?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Please join us for a live reading and discussion of Edgar Allan Poe's Raven for Halloween 2026.