Literature, like other forms of art, is designed to reflect the surrounding reality. Including the life of a person, his thoughts, experiences, actions and events. The category of space and time is an integral component of building an author’s picture of the world.
Term history
The very concept of a chronotope comes from the ancient Greek “chronos” (time) and “topos” (place) and denotes the unity of spatial and temporal parameters aimed at expressing a certain meaning.
For the first time this term was used by the psychologist Ukhtomsky in connection with his physiological studies. The appearance and widespread use of the term chronotope is largely due to the natural science discoveries of the early XX century, which contributed to the rethinking of the picture of the world as a whole. The distribution of the definition of a chronotope in literature is a merit of the famous Russian scientist, philosopher, literary critic, philologist and culturologist M. M. Bakhtin.
Bakhtin Chronotope Concept
The main work of M. M. Bakhtin, devoted to the category of time and space, is “Forms of time and chronotope in a novel. Essays on Historical Poetics ”, written in 1937-1938. and published in 1975, the author sees as the main task for himself in this work the study of the concept of a chronotope within the framework of a novel as a genre. Bakhtin based his analysis on European and, in particular, antique romance. In his work, the author shows that human images in literature, placed in certain spatio-temporal conditions, can acquire historical significance. As Bakhtin notes, the chronotope of the novel largely determines the development of the action and behavior of the characters. In addition, according to Bakhtin, the chronotope is a determining indicator of the genre of a work. Therefore, Bakhtin assigns this term a key role in understanding narrative forms and their development.
Chronotope value
Time and space in a literary work are the main components of the artistic image, which contribute to a holistic perception of artistic reality and organize the composition of the work. It is worth noting that when creating a work of art, the author gives the space and time in it subjective characteristics that reflect the author's worldview. Therefore, the space and time of one work of art will never be similar to the space and time of another work, and even more so will not be like real space and time. Thus, the chronotope in literature is the interrelation of spatio-temporal relations mastered in a particular work of art.
Chronotope functions
In addition to the genre-forming function that Bakhtin noted, the chronotope also performs the main plot-forming function. In addition, it is the most important formal-substantive category of a work, i.e. laying the foundations of artistic images, the chronotope in literature is a kind of independent image that is perceived on an associative-intuitive level. Organizing the space of the work, the chronotope introduces the reader into it and at the same time builds in the reader's mind the associative connections between the artistic whole and the surrounding reality.
The concept of a chronotope in modern science
Since the chronotope in literature is a central and fundamental concept, the work of many scientists from both the last century and the present is devoted to its study. Recently, researchers are paying more and more attention to the classification of chronotopes. Due to the convergence in the last decades of the natural, social and humanitarian sciences, approaches to the study of the chronotope have significantly changed. Interdisciplinary research methods are increasingly being used that allow us to discover new facets of a work of art and its author.
The development of the semiotic and hermeneutic analysis of the text made it possible to see that the chronotope of the work of art reflects the colors and sound tonality of the depicted reality, and also conveys the rhythm of action and the dynamics of the development of events. These methods help to comprehend the artistic space and time as a sign system containing semantic codes (historical, cultural, religious-mythical, geographical, etc.). Based on modern research, the following forms of chronotope are distinguished in the literature:
- cyclic chronotope;
- linear chronotope;
- chronotope of eternity;
- nonlinear chronotope.
It should be noted that some researchers consider separately the category of space and the category of time, while others consider these categories in an inextricable relationship, which, in turn, determines the features of a literary work.
Thus, in the light of modern research, the concept of a chronotope is gaining increasing importance as the most constructively stable and well-established category of a literary work.