In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole.
We understand the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature we will not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture. What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). The special meaning it has in relativity theory is not important for our purposes we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). This term is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. We will give the name chronotope (literally, 'time space') to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. In the essay Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, Bakhtin describes his use of the term thus: Specific chronotopes are said to correspond to particular genres, or relatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews or ideologies. Bakhtin's concept is a way of analyzing literary texts that reveals the forces operating in the cultural system from which they emanate. They argue that Bakhtin's concept differs from other uses of time and space in literary analysis because neither category is given a privileged status: they are inseparable and entirely interdependent. īakhtin scholars Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist state that the chronotope is "a unit of analysis for studying language according to the ratio and characteristics of the temporal and spatial categories represented in that language". Genre is rooted in how one perceives the flow of events and its representation of particular worldviews or ideologies. įor Bakhtin, chronotope is the conduit through which meaning enters the logosphere. For example, the chronotopic frame of the epic differed from that of the hero adventure or the comedy. Here Bakhtin showed how different literary genres operated with different configurations of time and space, which gave each genre its particular narrative character.
The term itself comes from the Russian xронотоп, which in turn is derived from the Greek χρόνος (' time') and τόπος (' space') it thus can be literally translated as "time-space." Bakhtin developed the term in his 1937 essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (« Формы времени и хронотопа в романе»). The term was taken up by Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin who used it as a central element in his theory of meaning in language and literature. In literary theory and philosophy of language, the chronotope is how configurations of time and space are represented in language and discourse.
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