Final Report Summary - NAMO (Narrative Modes of Historical Discourse in Asia)
The ERC Consolidator Project "Narrative Modes of Historical Discourse in Asia" (NAMO) has been concerned with creating new theories and methodologies for the study of historical narrative by drawing on literary and historical principles from classical Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan traditions. Based on this study, the project formulated a new Asian theory of narrative focused on issues of emplotment, storyline, the use of tropes and rhetoric, and the construction of historicity in historical writing. For example, the classical Indian tradition of dramaturgy is very different from the classical European understanding of plot, in that the Indian traditions puts less emphasis on the dramatic action and instead focuses on the transitions between each act. From this Indian tradition, it was then possible for the project to extract a new analytical model of emplotment in history writing, which follows the Indian tradition by emphasizing how a historical text explains a series of historical events by postulating transitions between them. In contract, the classical Chinese literary tradition does not have an elaborate model of dramatical emplotment but instead provides a very elaborate explanation of figuration in Chinese poetry, emphasizing the relationship between the context, scene, main idea, and aesthetic feeling expressed by a poem. From this Chinese tradition, it was then possible for the project to establish a new analytical model of trope and meaning formation in history writing, which follows the Chinese tradition by focusing on how a historical work gives meaning to a historical event by contextualizing it and placing it in a given scene. The project's models were then applied to the narrative analysis of a large number of classical, medieval, and modern Asian historiographies. It was shown how emplotment creates a sense of time, how the use of tropes creates a sense of meaning, and how the construction of historicity creates a sense of the past. Furthermore, the project also engaged in extensive collaborations with specialists of the Western humanities in order to see how the Asian methods and applied studies might compare with narrative studies on European history writing. In short, the project was able to establish a new methodology for the study of historical narrative by drawing on classical Asian traditions of literary theory, dramaturgy, and rhetoric, and these findings have turned out to be applicable not only to the study of Asian historiography but also more broadly to narrative in literature and history in other cultural traditions, including European fiction and non-fiction.