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”.