Chronotope in the theory of narrative

Abstract

The interrelations of time and space in literature, or chronotope, as it is called by Bakhtin in his book Questions of Literature and Aesthetics, constitute a fundamental unity reflecting unbreakable bonds between space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). He defined chronotope as a literary category whose meaning is related to genre, with chronotopes characteristic to each genre and its different configurations of space and time. In literature, the primary category in the chronotope is time. The term is also used in mathematics and it was introduced as part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The paper sheds light on the features of chronotope in the theory of narrative.

Keywords

• space
• time
• narrative
• story
• narrative poetics