It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time. The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. We understand the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature we will not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture.’ In the literary-artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole.
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.
The essay from which this blog gets its name, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” was written in the late 1930s. Bakhtin completed in the 1930s and 1940s, but it was not published in English until the 1970s. The Dialogic Imagination is made up of a series of long essays in literary criticim that M.M. In the spirit of spring (and thank goodness for the relief, however impermanent, from the bleak March cold), I am re-introducing The Chronotope, which I’ve missed, with the famous passage that gave it its name. It’s odd how time and space can get in the way of blogging.
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