Towards Chronotopia

This article advocates a review of Bakhtin’s chronotope. Whilst Bakhtin’s general approach (promoting reflections on the investigation of a worldview put into narrative form) is fully acknowledged, doubt is cast upon his synthetic view of the complex relations that exist between the chronotope, the literary genre, and the individual narrative. Moving away from an understanding of the chronotope as the expression of the unity of novelistic texts, this article favours the study of the dimensional complexity that can exist in any literary narrative. The modified methodology is inspired by Bakhtin’s own analysis, which suggests that three dimensions of the chronotope–vertical, horizontal, and conventional–can appear in various degrees and combinations in the literary text, both on the ideological and the poetic level. The brief commentaries on some classic literary texts suggest that the dimensional interplay, termed chronotopia, may tend towards a more monological (cohesive) or dialogical (complex) narrative.