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Paper short abstract:

I discuss the relationship of narratives with historical experience by examination of expressions for the past in court historiography and diaries. These texts give evidence of a new historical awareness I approach by investigating temporal aspects in regard to genre, social background, and purpose.

Paper long abstract:

The advent of historical tale literature during the 11th century marks an important development in Japanese historiography. Following up on the earlier abandoned official court chronicles, emerging private histories give evidence of a new historical awareness. While the Eiga monogatari took up the temporal frame and structure of the last unfinished Shin kokushi, the Ōkagami rewrote the same past into a new literary setting that would become the model for succeeding historiography in Japanese. It is this kind of historical experience I discuss in my paper by looking at temporal expressions. The main focus is on perceptions of the past concerning quantitative and qualitative aspects in court historiography and political diaries. Attention is given in particular also to recent theoretical approaches to history in Japan and the possibility to apply them to premodern sources.

Parallel to both mentioned and already well studied sources, courtly diaries and chronicles in literary Chinese offer further valuable insights. They demonstrate the continuing historical awareness of the court elite in its reliance on the past as a model for decision making and ritual decorum. One can hardly overestimate the importance of historical precedents in the political discourse. Courtiers frequently referred to historical examples for justifying their positions and their conduct at an overall highly agonal court. History was thus perceived in these sources mostly in pragmatic terms. Yet how past conceptions differed and functioned is not clear. Compared to the historical tale literature, these texts access the past from a different perspective according to their genre, social background, and purpose. They have hitherto received less attention than more elaborate literary writings for assessing historical experience, which is not surprising, given their largely repetitive style and bureaucratic content. An in-depth analysis of chronographic elements from a synchronic perspective will reveal how the court nobility's conceptions of time differ.

I will limit my paper to an examination of a selection of different textual evidence from late 11th and early 12th century source material. On the basis of my results, I hope to shed some light on the connections between verbal expressions and their social and political conditions.

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Paper short abstract:

Scattered comments regarding the perceived brevity of human life appear in medieval tales where encounters with other worlds and forms of existence betoken a vast cosmological framework. How do such tales reflect the relative position of humans within it and articulate layers of temporality?

Paper long abstract:

Things happen within an environment, which is, in the broadest sense, the conjunction of space and time. The way in which people make sense of their world within a temporally constrained existence is shaped by their engagement with it and finds expression in narratives. Kamakura (1185–1333) and Muromachi-period (1336–1573) tales incorporate elements that reveal a preoccupation with death and its inevitability, displaying a profound awareness of a finite allocation of time. Similes such as “life as fleeting as dew” present well-known tropes that utilise natural imagery to convey notions of impermanence. This paper seeks to investigate how temporal delimitation is addressed and portrayed, and what conclusions can be drawn about the conceptualisation of time within the narrative framework. Centring on the theme of the human lifespan as a case study and by taking a closer look at the different layers of temporality in medieval setsuwa and otogi zōshi, different facets of what is subsumed under a generalised notion of time will be examined and how the perceived shortness of a human life is accounted for.

A basic differentiation between experienced time as opposed to constructed time serves to highlight the vast timescales against which human life was measured. In this way, humans are firmly placed within a broader context of other existences and an all-encompassing conception of time, emphasising their embeddedness in a predominantly Buddhist cosmology. Time itself flows differently depending on the realm and the longevity of other beings is characterised by an otherworldly nature. Thus, the juxtaposition of the human realm with other worlds through intersection or infringement uncovers temporal discrepancies that further accentuate the brevity of the human lifespan. Examples of how the fortunate traveller to another realm might prolong life by partaking of it and references to the idea that life expectancy underwent periods of shortening and lengthening in line with Buddhist cyclical notions of time attest to a profound contemplation of life’s conditions as they were encountered. With this paper I hope to contribute a nuanced consideration of the complexities surrounding the multi-layered and interrelated temporalities as they emerge from medieval tale literature.

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Paper short abstract:

Medieval court ladies’ diaries reflect the same social background, but they vary in terms of how they figuratively map time and shape emotional communities. Such aesthetic objectifications of temporal sensations can be decoded by focusing on the works’ poems using cognitive linguistic approaches.

Paper long abstract:

The phenomenological world, as perceived through our senses, profoundly shapes our emotionality, and therefore also our awareness of “time”—one of the most basic dimensions to cognitively grasp the world. But how do temporal sensations find expression in literature?

Cognitive linguists stress the importance of figurative language for the comprehension and expression of abstract concepts and understanding the objective world. They therefore argue that temporal sensations are often conveyed through movements and objects in space and are thus “mapped” using conceptual metaphors (Lakoff/Johnson). This evokes Ki no Tsurayuki’s famous statement that we express our feelings in poetry through “things we see and hear”. Extensions through metaphors are furthermore seen to provide “conceptual image schemata” that are shared by members of a cultural group. This relates to the field of the “history of emotions” that understands textual output as an endeavor to create “emotional communities” (Rosenwein) based on common backgrounds, and thereby highlights the significance of objectives as they shape specific works or genres.

This paper seeks to conceptually map aesthetic objectifications of temporal sensations and emotions in medieval court diaries by focusing mainly on their poems, the very nodes through which such sensations intensify metaphorically. The Kenshumon’in chūnagon nikki (1219), Ben no naishi nikki (1246–1252), and Nakatsukasa no naishi nikki (1280–1289) will serve as case studies, since they can be embedded in the same historical, social, and gendered context. Concomitantly, the works vary in terms of how they figuratively “map” time and shape emotional communities.

Using approaches from cognitive linguistics to analyze the three sources, I will explore whether time is rather mapped as movement in space or as a commodity, and which “lexical concepts of time” (Evans) are used to describe temporal sensations. A linguistic analysis of literary expressions of “time” will enable us to delineate the different ways in which their authors perceived, felt, and envisioned time, and uncover their respective motivations. The proposed paper thus combines linguistic approaches with research interests in the social sciences and humanities, reflecting the spatial, the affective, and—most importantly—the “temporal turn”.