In our online workshop "Genre profile and time index" on March 7, 2022 we discussed the following ideas:

In a first step, the relationship between “time and genre” can be divided into different problem areas, which can and must be systematically related to each other in a second step. Four aspects seem to be of particular importance:

1. the understanding/awareness of time exhibited or implied in texts of different genres in different periods (object level 1: synchronic);
2. the change of the exhibited or implicit time understanding/awareness in one and the same genre in different periods respectively (object level 2: diachronic);
3. the interdependence of epochal and different generic constructs in a specific time period (meta-level 1: synchronic);
4. transformation processes of genre systems due to transformations of epochal configurations (meta-level 2: diachronic).

In addition to these four aspects, further dimensions emerge  - in particular, but not only - from a medievalist and early modernist perspective, which contribute to undermining the clear heuristic demarcations between aspects 1- 4 to some extent already at the object level, not least because the time indices often inscribed in the genres or implicitly associated with them become the object of aesthetic reflection in the texts themselves.

Therefore, the following questions build on the aspects above:

• What role does genre mixture play in the drafting of temporalities in the texts?
• To what extent does the (de)construction of temporalities in the texts themselves contribute to the critique of concepts of epochs?
• What aesthetic dimensions play a role in the construction of temporalities? What is the connection between time/temporality and aesthetic production?
• What dynamics, tensions, aesthetic and reflexive potentials can be gained from the complex relationship between genre and temporality - especially when the temporalities constructed in the texts contradict the concepts of time as conventionally associated with the respective genres?
• What are the effects of having multiple temporalities in the texts on the understanding of genres?
• How does the relationship between genre and discourse conventions (e.g., religious, ancient courtly, vernacular, or Latin discourses) affect the construction of such hybrid, multiple temporalities? Do variable constructions of time at the object level tend to be thematic, semantic, allegorical, and/or structural-semiotic? And at the meta-level, how is the literary history of particular genres related to their theoretical history?
• How can the analytically diffuse ('emergent'), not infrequently ironically staged transitions between a formally distinct genre (e.g. allegory, satire, 'lyricism') and genre-transgressive 'writing' (e.g. genre or discourse citations) be grasped as precisely as possible for the simultaneously transformed temporalities?