Mary Rose Watkins
The Dance of Time and Space: Chronotopes Cheryl Caesar American University of Paris
Chronotope: Definition 1 « Chronotope [:] the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature » (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 84) « Space and time are inevitably functionally related » (Hall, The Dance of Life 69).
Chronotope: Definition 2 « The chronotope is where the knots of narrative are tied and untied […] emerges as a center for concretising representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel […] All the novel’s abstract elements - philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect - gravitate towards the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work » (DI 250).
Chronotope: Definition 3 « An optic for reading texts as X-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring » (DI 426).
« I have grown to depend on literature as a source of discovering people’s preoccupations » (Dance 134).
Research Questions How can the chronotope serve as a tool to analyze the proxemics and the chronemics of a given culture, through the optic of an image? As an image, how can it help us to investigate primary level, core or basic level culture which often lies too deep for words?
Chronotopes: Examples The Road The Threshhold The Idyll (example: the village square) The Castle
The Road Copyright: vincent rousserie ( vincent24 ) (6678) vincent24 The Road
« encounter » « chance » « emotional intensity » « collapse of social distances » (DI )
The Road in Literature The Greek romance, the adventure novel, the picaresque Quest narratives E. M. Forster, « The Other Side of the Wall » Jack Kerouac, On the Road Robert Frost, « The Road Not Taken »
The Threshhold
The Threshhold « crisis and break » « the falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies that determine the whole life of a man » [T]ime is essentially instantaneous » (DI 428)
The Village Square Sandi Lebron The Village Square
The Village Square (chronotope of the idyll) « […] an organic fastening-down, a grafting of life and its events to a place, to a familiar territory […] unity of place […] unity of rhythm, the common language used to describe phenomena of nature and the events of human life » (DI 225-6)
The Château The Castle
« the time of the historical past » « architecture […] furnishings, weapons, the ancestral portrait gallery, the family archives » « legends and traditions » (DI 246)
Chronotope in Film In Subversive Pleasures, Robert Stam argues that the chronotope’s fullest expression is film (187).
The Road Copyright: vincent rousserie ( vincent24 ) (6678) vincent24 The Road
Daily-life applications American « superficiality » in friendship AE waiting-room impatience
The Road Copyright: vincent rousserie ( vincent24 ) (6678) vincent24 The Road
The Threshhold
The Waiting Room 1 © 2007 Michael Morales.
The Village Square Sandi Lebron The Village Square
The Waiting Room: 2
Conclusion Can the chronotope be seen as an archetype, an element of the collective unconscious? If so, is it possible that as the animus seeks the anima and vice versa, we may seek those chronotopes repressed by our culture?
A Brief Bibliography Bakhtin, Michael (1981): The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Transl. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Ed. by Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: U. of Texas Press. Hall, Edward. The Dance of Life (1984): New York: Doubleday. Stam, Robert (1989): Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins U. Press. Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin (1997): Manchester University Press.
Cheryl Caesar Center for Language Research and Teaching American University of Paris Department of English and Comparative Literature
Mary Rose Watkins