Concept Of Chronotope Research Articles

Investigating chronotopes to advance a dialogical theory of collaborative sensemaking

The aim of this paper is to highlight the contribution offered by the dialogical approach in understanding the interconnectedness of the situated sensemaking and situation-transcending processes occurring during the collaborative finalization of a product. We propose a dialogical theory of sensemaking based on the concepts of chronotope, voice and artefact mediation, aimed at investigating how multiple space–time frames are interconnected in collaborative sensemaking. We argue that this analysis is complementary to both the semiotic and the institutional analyses of sensemaking, which constitute the basis of our theorizing. To concretely illustrate our proposal for a chronotopic analysis of collaborative sensemaking, we qualitatively discuss an excerpt taken from a meeting of a multidisciplinary professional team working on the finalization of a web platform meant for enterprises.

Following Reading Primers the Wrong Way: Pedagogical Nonsense in Dr. Seuss

A well-versed writer on the limitations and possibilities of the English language, Seuss follows the conventional primers the wrong way, not by retracing the tradition of the genre, but by working his way against the current. Drawing upon Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s notion of nonsense, this essay is a small attempt to examine three of Dr. Seuss’s beginner books—The Cat in the Hat, One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, and Green Eggs and Ham—along with Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas. It argues that Bakhtin’s concepts of chronotope, carnivals and dialogism offer themselves as toolkits to illuminate the nonsensical chronotopes prevalent in Seuss’s books, including multiple mini-chronotopes, narratorial voices, and mixing of the everyday and fantasy in a dialogic way. The Seussian world in the three books is read as a collection of nonsensical chronotopes in which everyday scenes are converted into carnivalesque mini-chronotopes, parallel to the real world but having their own logics. The Seussian rhymes are also far from being monologic in nature, but are woven and constructed as a dialogic mode of discourse. Seussian nonsense texts partake in the invention of a genre by demonstrating a radical pedagogy of priming that sees a word more than a concept but also endowed with certain physicality and dialogicity. The nonsensical chronotopes also demonstrate a dialogic demand on readers, inviting them to engage with books, have fun reading, and see the world in an alternative way.

Chronotopical Structure and the Dismantling of Historical Myth: The Representation of 1936 Madrid in Eduardo Mendoza’s Riña de gatos (2010) and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s La noche de los tiempos (2009)

Since the mid-1990s in Spain, a renewal of interest in the history of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975) has resulted in a surge of cultural and historiographical production related to the subject, as well as instigating a robust debate about how these difficult periods ought to be officially interpreted and commemorated. This so-called memory boom indicates that there is still an unresolved tension in Spanish society, and while there are many who speak in favour of a final reconciliation, the means of best achieving it are so contested that old divisions appear to have been paradoxically widened rather than diminished. The two novels which are treated in the present study Eduardo Mendoza’s Rina de gatos ( An Englishman in Madrid; 2010), and Antonio Munoz Molina’s La noche de los tiempos ( The Night of Memories; 2009) make an important literary contribution to the debate, and although they are very different in tone and style, they evidence a mature, considered approach to the issues. Drawing upon the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope (the organisation of space-time in the novel), this paper will contend that the two works, in their different ways, inscribe and subvert the conventions of the classical historical novel in order to challenge historical myths and open up a dialogic space within which the reader can engage critically with the past. This narrative strategy prevents the war from being plotted as an inevitable tragedy, therefore emphasising the argument made by both novels that, contrary to popular belief, the civil war was not simply the result of a radical polarisation between the mythical “two Spains” eternally at war, but of a complex of factors, both national and international.

Mikhail Bakhtin e Manoel de Barros: entre o cronotopo e a infância

RESUMONeste artigo aproximamos a infância, o espaço e o tempo através da literatura e da filosofia. Partimos da leitura que Bakhtin faz das obras de François Rabelais, no contexto do realismos grotesco, e do conceito de cronotopo aí formulado. Bakhtin constrói uma perspectiva filosófica de espaço-tempo aberto e coletivo, de liberdade e criação. A literatura de Manoel de Barros, por sua vez, materializa um cronotopo, afirmando uma visão de mundo e de homem no embate entre sentidos e valores. Chegamos ao entendimento de que os poemas de Barros possuem uma estética particular que se aproxima daquela analisada por Bakhtin. É regida por uma relação espaço-temporal que trabalha com a infância associada à criação, envolvendo o espaço-tempo do inútil e da contemplação, o rebaixamento do olhar, o renascimento e a produção de vizinhanças entre elementos heterogêneos.

Social practices from the viewpoint of trans-subjective existentialism

The principal aim of this article is to examine the capacity of existential analytic to suggest alternatives to entrenched dichotomies and dilemmas in practice theory, and more generally, in social theory. In this regard, the doctrine of trans-subjective existentialism is developed. The underlying aim is to inform hermeneutic engagement with social practices’ potentiality-for-being in order to illuminate a possible existential ontology of practices. It is argued that the concept of chronotope should be central in this ontology. Thus, the possibility of hermeneutic realism about social practices becomes open to scrutiny.

Rhetorical unit analysis and Bakhtin’s chronotype

Bakhtin introduced the concept of chronotope (chronos = time; topos = space) to facilitate his exploration of the ways in which space-time intersections occur in literary texts. However, he also suggests that chronotopes characterise non-literary texts — indeed, that “every entry into the sphere of meaning is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope” (1981: 258) — this historical, biographical and social time-space configuration. This formulation immediately suggests that these categories should be accessible via the categories of language and indeed, in English, they are most generally expressed via the Mood categories Subject and Finite. These same Mood categories of English are crucially involved in the identification of a unit of discourse — the rhetorical unit (Cloran 1994). Thus, this discourse unit provides a useful means of concretising, from a linguistic perspective, Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope and investigating the presence of such chronotopes in the everyday mundane discourse of mother-child interaction. Selections from such interaction are illustrations of authentic cultural chronotopes, and provide exempla of a (sub)cultural chronotopic motif within the broader culture, i.e. social positioning at a particular historical point in time (the late 20th century Australian culture).

Saint Petersburg 300

Focusing on the televising of Saint Petersburg's 300th anniversary, this article elucidates, and ultimately complicates, the notion of Russian media complicity in a state-led national identity mission in which the city's mythology is used to (re)integrate prerevolutionary imperial tradition with Soviet ritual and Western ideology. It draws on Dayan and Katz's notion of media event and on Bakhtin's concepts of chronotope and carnival that facilitate this particular media event's cultural contextualization. The analysis reveals how television articulates a distinctive Saint Petersburg space-time accommodating an ideologically sanitized national carnival of popular participation, but also a local identity project that, precisely by offsetting the latter, authenticates it. It further identifies the rudiments of a generic model for televising national celebrations. Through the metatextuality characterizing that model, the medium inscribes itself into the participatory process it describes, confirming that, far from suppressing democratic rhetoric, Russian television internalizes it, recasting it for nation-building purposes.

Positioning Students as Actors and Authors: A Chronotopic Analysis of Collaborative Learning Activities

Bakhtin's (1981) concept of chronotope provides a way of viewing student participation in the classroom as a dynamic process constituted through the interaction of past experience, ongoing involvement, and yet-to-be-accomplished goals. Although the actual design and use of classroom space may be important in facilitating a participatory pedagogy, chronotopic analysis directs attention to the grounding of interaction in dynamic and shifting time-space contexts that are emergent within the students' and teacher's discursive practices. In our analyses of classroom events and conversations, we focus on the agency of the students in actively shaping the space-time contexts of the classroom, considering how particular groundings for interaction are created as they draw on past, present, and future temporal relations to explain and justify their ideas to one another. Our analyses provide insights into the contested nature of the time-space relationships in the classroom, the hybridization of time-space contexts, and the ways students enter into past, present, and future time-space contexts during collaborative work in the classroom.

AN INTERPRETIVE DIALOGUE: Beckett's "First Love" and Bakhtin's Categories of Meaning

From the very first sentence of "First Love", Beckett's narrator-protagonist engages the reader in an aggressive, one-sided dialogue. We might respond by bringing the voice of the narrator, and Beckett's narrative in general, into contact with the major theorizer of dialogue, Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin's categories of genre suggest that Beckett's story may share strategic affinities with the menippea, while his concept of chronotope helps to clarify some of the contradictory details in the text. It is the idea of dialogue, however, with its implied surrender of power to the other that dominates the text and obsesses the narrator. In illuminating the narrator's resistance to, and regretful acknowledgement of his dialogic position in the worId, Bakhtin's words respond to and renew Beckett's.