This Case Study looks at time-related emotions in literary genres that center on the lives at the court and the boudoir from a gendered perspective. The source texts selected for this investigation are medieval kana diaries (nikki 日記). Besides the most pertinent medieval diaries written by court ladies, this case study will also look at the Minamoto no Ienaga nikki 源家長日記 (ca 1216–1221), one of the few vernacular male diaries. This allows for an examination of gendered differences in the literary conceptualization of time. Kana diaries present particularly interesting sources for the investigation of time-related emotions, as they are retrospective self-representations (cf. Imazeki 1984; Ramirez-Christensen 2001) that preserve time through memory and intricately interweave subjective experiences with generic conventions.
The project will also look at giko monogatari 擬古物, court tales that imitate the classical style. Source texts of this case study are the Ariake no wakare 有明の別れ, the Iwade shinobu いわでしのぶ (ca. 1235–1251) and the Shinobine monogatari 忍音物語. Court tales are intriguing as their rhetorical devices are strongly influenced by Heian-period literature, and as they display a deep concern with issues of gender, which are expressed, for example, by the blurring of sexes, encoding a critical view of medieval gender roles (cf. Kimura 2008, 2009).
Backed by gender-narratology and discourse semantics this case study aims at examining how power structures at the medieval court may have shaped, or gendered (cf. Kristeva 1981) kana diaries and court tales, and which rhetorical techniques were applied to exhibit protagonists’ conflicts between individual conceptions of Lebenszeit (Blumenberg 1986) and socially determined time practices.
Moreover, based on intertextual and chronotopic analyses, it will be examined how the protagonists’ emotive temporality such as memory (retention) and expectation (protention) (cf. Husserl 1991) is navigated poetically and how time-related emotions such as impatience, grief, boredom, fear, melancholia, or nostalgia are chronotopically produced in these works.Finally, it will be examined which categories of cognitive linguistics (cf. Lakoff/Johnson 1999; Evans 2004) predominate in the respective works.
Investigations into how cognitive and emotional conflicts related to issues of time in medieval diaries and court tales were perceived, expressed, reflected, and managed thus allow to shed light on the way political, economic, and gendered power structures precondition temporal sensations and the cognition of the determinacy of time (cf. Morson 1994, 1998, 2010) and how changes in these power structures influence time-specific metaphorical extensions.
