Chronotope

The Russian philologist and literary philosopher M.M. Bakhtin used the term chronotope to designate the spatio-temporal matrix which governs the base condition of all narratives and other linguistic acts. The term itself can be literally translated as "time-space".

Bakhtin 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'. Specific chronotopes are said to correspond to particular genres, or relatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews or ideologies. To this extent, a chronotope is both a cognitive concept and a narrative feature of language.

The distinctiveness of chronotopic analysis, in comparison to most other uses of time and space in language analysis, stems from the fact neither time nor space is privileged by Bakhtin, they are utterly interdependent and they should be studied in this manner.

Linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso invoked "chronotopes" in discussing Western [Apache] stories linked with places. At least in the 1980s when Basso was writing about the stories, geographic features reminded the Western Apache of "the moral teachings of their history" by recalling to mind events that occurred there in important moral narratives. By merely mentioning "it happened at [the place called] 'men stand above here and there,'" storyteller Nick Thompson could remind locals of the dangers of joining "with outsiders against members of their own community." Geographic features in the Western Apache landscape are chronotopes, Basso says, in precisely the way Bakhtin defines the term when he says they are “points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse. Time takes on flesh and becomes visible for human contemplation; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time and history and the enduring character of a people. . .. Chronotopes thus stand as monuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces operating to shape its members' images of themselves” (1981:84, as cited by Basso 1984:44-45).

References

M.M. Bakhtin (1981) 'The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin', translated by Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press

K. Basso (1984) 'Stalking with Stories: Names, Places, and Moral Narratives among the Western Apache.' In E. Bruner, ed. Text, Play and Story. Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society.

Also of interest is Joseph Frank's essay 'Spatial Form in Modern Literature', Sewanee Review, 1945, Vol. 2-3