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A term borrowed from Einstein\'s physics by Mikhail Bakhtin in order to describe the prototypical cultural formations of time-space found in specific narrative genres such as the romance, the idyll, the folktale, the picaresque novel, the historical novel, and so on. The chronotope is, in other words, \'an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring\' (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 426). In recent years, the term has been broadened out to describe almost any cultural formation of time-space as in, for example, the work of Paul Gilroy (1993). (NJT)
Reference Bakhtin, M. 1981: The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gilroy, P. 1993: The Black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso. Holloway, J. and Kneale, J. 1999: Bakhtin\'s geographies. In M. Crang, and N.J. Thrift, eds, Thinking space. London: Routledge. Morson, G.S. 1996. Narrative and freedom. The shadows of time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. |
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