Research project Chronotopia – the particularity of the individual text
The project aims to investigate whether Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope can be modified to better explore the individual text rather than seeing the text as an example of an overarching category.
Hans Färnlöf is doing research on the relationship between the individual text and the overarching categories to which the text is said to belong (e.g. a genre or a literary movement). The project aims to investigate whether Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope can be modified to better explore the individual text rather than seeing the text as an example of an overarching category.
Project description
The chronotope is a concept coined by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). It literally means time-space. The idea is to always think about how time and space interact: if one is to describe a spatial motif – such as a drawing-room, a road or a castle – one also needs to take into account its temporal dimensions, e.g. its history or how it changes. Bakhtin uses the chronotope – i.e. time and space linked together as decisive parameters – to see both how the story is formed and which worldview is reflected by the literary text. He links the chronotope to both eras and literary genres: the realistic novel has a certain chronotope, the adventure novel has another and so forth. According to Bakhtin, time and space are shaped by each genre in a certain way.
Bakhtin thus defines a series of overarching categories and places the individual text in one or more of these. The individual work becomes a sum of relations with overarching concepts. The project wants to investigate whether one can instead adopt an approach that permits to perform an analysis which is less influenced by these overarching categories. For example, if one assumes in advance that the text one is going to read is a romantic drama or a realistic novel, one can overlook aspects that are not usually associated with the respective movement or genre. The idea of the project is to define different dimensions of the chronotope, both in terms of narrative and thematic elements, and create a more neutral analysis model that to a higher extent puts forward the uniqueness of the individual text.
Project members
Project managers
Hans Färnlöf
Professor
