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Time and Emotion in Medieval Japanese Literature

Project Outline

Lead

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. Time-related emotions are generated by bodily experience and determined by social and gendered structures as well as religious and ideological currents. In literature, temporal emotions are expressed through aesthetic objectivations of motions and objects in space that exhibit generic patterns. These, in turn, shape the social habitus of the intended recipient and create “conceptual image schemata”.

Content and Aim of the Research Project

The follow-up project of the Horizon Europe funden ERC Advanced Grant Project "Time in Medieval Japan (TIMEJ) (https://www.timej.uzh.ch/en.html) (PI Raji C. Steineck, 01.09.2017 – 31.08.2023)   – “Time and Emotion in Medieval Japanese Literature” seeks to conceptually map such aesthetic objectivations of time-related emotions in medieval Japanese literature. By using a set of methodological tools, which span approaches from narratology, cognitive linguistics, and historical discourse semantics, different levels of literarily construed temporalities in representative literary genres of this period (late 12th to late 16th centuries) will be uncovered and scaled according to emotive Lebenswelten.
 
The project is designed as a set of case studies, each of which represents relevant medieval genres and their specific anthropospheres. It will look at time-related emotions in court tales and diaries (court and boudoir), recluse literature (road and hermitage), war tales (warrior households and the battlefield), as well as legends and Muromachi tales (sacred spaces and fantastic worlds). In each of these genres, multilayered temporal concepts, spaces, and emotions are negotiated: Historical and genealogical, mythical and fantastic, religious as well as courtly notions of time are expressed. The project aims at conceptualizing the relevant layers of temporal emotions in these literary genres of medieval Japan and at generating a discursive “panopticon” of aesthetically imagined temporalities.

Scientific and Social Context of the Research Project

The project combines research interests of the three most recent paradigm shifts in the social sciences and humanities: the spatial, the affective, and—most importantly—the “temporal turn”, which has recently returned to the focus of scholarly interest. This innovative approach will shed new light on the experience and aesthetical objectivation of time-related emotions in medieval Japan. The analytical model for the study of qualitative timer-related emotions, which will be developed during the project, can be applied in subsequent research projects to further epochs, literary currents, and other media up to the present, whilst taking a cultural and social “reality” that is in constant dialogue with the arts into consideration.

Keywords

time, emotion, medieval Japan, literature, (cognitive) narratology, cognitive linguistics, historical discourse semantics