Chronotopic identities: Narrating Made in Italy across spatiotemporal scales

Abstract

The potential that narratives have to transport storytellers and audiences across time and space has made them fertile sites to study temporal and spatial effects in many disciplines. Through an analysis of a corpus of oral narratives that we collected in Northern Italy, this article extends Bakhtin's notion of literary chronotopes to empirical real-time oral narratives as they emerge in our interviews with Italian executives. In particular, we explore how brand identities are (co)constructed in interview settings through the chronotopic stances that executives take vis-à-vis their corporate world and across various spatiotemporal scales. By bridging the latest theories on the Bakthinian chronotope with a more recent multiscalar approach, this article advances theories and methods in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics.