Have been reading the conversation on chronotopes with a great deal
of interest and have enjoyed how Jay, Eugene, and others pushed the
conversation toward value, ideology, and considering the qualitative
differences among time-spaces a la Bakhtin--putting to work on the
institution of schooling and schooled practices the kind of analysis
that B. put to work on literature.
Eugene's note about his car and the university garage (in the middle
of the conversation) reminded me of how Bakhtin talks about
chronotopic motifs--the sense in which an entire time-space can be
called up by an image, briefly sketched scene, or typified action
(e.g., strangers meeting on the road). Eugene's car getting locked in
the university garage is an example--an image that calls up
institutional control of schedule and space, Eugene's traversals to
home or other spaces, etc.
I wonder how others on the list conceive of limits of the chronotope
as Bakhtin has developed it. In my thinking, Bakhtin's notion of
time-space is overly dominated by the temporal/historical and a thin
on the spatial, the simultaneous, the dispersed, or rich notions of
place. He seems primarily interested in the relation between the
chronotope and characters' (historical) development (or lack thereof).
I also don't think that Bakhtin gets us far along in thinking about
the relations between semiotic and material chronotopes. He certainly
recognized that the chrontopes of the work (e.g., novel) and the
chronotopes of the reader's world come together and interact, but
beyond this, I sense we need to go elsewhere to develop a more rich
theory of time-space production across "perceived spaces" and
"conceived spaces" (Lefebvre).
But, would love to hear more reflections and arguments on Bakhtin or otherwise.
Kevin
>Dear Mike and everybody-
>
>I'm risking my car being locked in the University garage but I want to
>briefly reply to your question,
-- Kevin Leander, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Teaching and Learning Vanderbilt University www.vanderbilt.edu/litspace
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