Chronotope in literature is the main category of storytelling

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Literature, like other forms of art, is designed to reflect the surrounding reality. Including the life of a person, his thoughts, experiences, actions and events. The category of space and time is an integral component of the construction of the author's picture of the world.

History of the term

The very concept of chronotope comes from the ancient Greek "chronos" (time) and "topos" (place) and denotes the unity of spatial and temporal parameters, aimed at expressing a certain meaning.

For the first time this term was used by the psychologist Ukhtomsky in connection with his physiological research. The emergence and widespread use of the term chronotope is largely due to the natural science discoveries of the early 20th century, which contributed to a rethinking of the picture of the world as a whole. The spread of the definition of chronotope in literature is the merit of the famous Russian scientist, philosopher, literary critic, philologist and culturologist M. M. Bakhtin.

Bakhtin's chronotope concept

The main work of M. M. Bakhtin, dedicated to the category of time and space, is “Formstime and chronotope in the novel. Essays on historical poetics”, written in 1937-1938. and published in 1975. The main task for himself in this work, the author sees the study of the concept of chronotope within the framework of the novel as a genre. Bakhtin based his analysis on the European and, in particular, the ancient novel. In his work, the author shows that the images of a person in literature, placed in certain spatio-temporal conditions, can acquire historical significance. As Bakhtin notes, the chronotope of the novel largely determines the development of the action and the behavior of the characters. In addition, according to Bakhtin, the chronotope is a defining indicator of the genre of a work. Therefore, Bakhtin assigns a key role to this term in understanding narrative forms and their development.

Chronotope value

Time and space in a literary work are the main components of the artistic image, which contribute to a holistic perception of artistic reality and organize the composition of the work. It should be noted that when creating a work of art, the author endows space and time in it with subjective characteristics that reflect the author's worldview. Therefore, the space and time of one work of art will never be similar to the space and time of another work, and even more so will not be similar to real space and time. Thus, the chronotope in literature is the relationship of space-time relations mastered in a particular artisticwork.

Chronotope functions

In addition to the genre-forming function that Bakhtin noted, the chronotope also performs the main plot-forming function. In addition, it is the most important formal-content category of the work, i.e. laying the foundations of artistic images, the chronotope in literature is a kind of independent image that is perceived at the associative-intuitive level. By organizing the space of the work, the chronotope introduces the reader into it and at the same time builds in the reader's mind associative links between the artistic whole and the surrounding reality.

The concept of chronotope in modern science

Since the chronotope in literature is a central and fundamental concept, the works of many scientists of both the last century and the present are devoted to its study. Recently, researchers have paid more and more attention to the classification of chronotopes. Due to the convergence of the natural, social and human sciences in recent decades, approaches to the study of the chronotope have changed significantly. Increasingly, interdisciplinary research methods are being used, which allow discovering new facets of a work of art and its author.

The development of semiotic and hermeneutic text analysis made it possible to see that the chronotope of a work of art reflects the color scheme and sound tonality of the depicted reality, and also conveys the rhythm of action and the dynamics of the development of events. These methods help to comprehend artistic space and time asa sign system containing semantic codes (historical, cultural, religious-mythical, geographical, etc.). Based on modern research, the following forms of chronotope in the literature are distinguished:

• cyclic chronotope;
• linear chronotope;
• chronotope of eternity;
• nonlinear chronotope.

It should be noted that some researchers consider separately the category of space and the category of time, while others consider these categories in an inextricable relationship, which, in turn, determines the features of a literary work.

Thus, in the light of modern research, the concept of chronotope is becoming increasingly important as the most constructively stable and well-established category of a literary work.