The Fugue of Chronotope

As the survey by Nele Bemong and Pieter Borghart introducing this volume makes clear, the term chronotope has devolved into a veritable carnival of orismology. For all the good work that has been done by an ever-growing number of intelligent critics, chronotope remains a Gordian knot of ambiguities with no Alexander in sight. The term has metastasized across the whole spectrum of the human and social sciences since the publication of FTC in Russian in 1975, and (especially) after its translation into English in 1981. As others have pointed out, one of the more striking features of the chronotope is the plethora of meanings that have been read into the term: that its popularity is a function of its opacity has become a cliché. In the current state of chronotopic heteroglossia, then, how are we to proceed? The argument of this essay is that many of the difficulties faced by Bakhtin’s critics derive from ambiguities with which Bakhtin never ceased to struggle. That is, instead of advancing yet another definition of my own, I will investigate some of the attempts made by Bakhtin himself to give the term greater precision throughout his long life. In so doing, I will also hope to cast some light on the foundational role of time-space in Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialog as it, too, took on different meanings at various points in his thinking

Introduction

Introduction to the special issue on Mikhail Bakhti

Increases in Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even with Typical Text Presentation: Implications for the Reading of Literature

Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding (“she thought I left” embedding her perspective on “I left”), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects the time that it takes readers to read and understand short vignettes in a moving window paradigm. With increasing levels of embedment from 1 to 5, reading times in a moving window paradigm rose almost linearly. However, level 0 was as slow as 3–4. Accuracy on probe questions was relatively constant until dropping at the fifth level. Here, we assessed this effect in a more ecologically valid (“typical”) reading paradigm, in which the entire vignette was visible at once, either for as long as desired (Experiment 1) or a fixed time (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, reading times followed a pattern similar to that of the previous experiment, with some differences in absolute speed. Accuracy matched previous results: fairly consistent accuracy until a decline at level 5, indicating that both presentation methods allowed understanding. In Experiment 2, accuracy was somewhat reduced, perhaps because participants were less successful at allocating their attention than they were during the earlier experiment; however, the pattern was the same. It seems that literature does not, on average, use easiest reading level but rather uses a middle ground that challenges the reader, but not too much

Beyond national narratives? : centenary histories, the First World War and the Armenian Genocide

In April 2015 the centenary of the Armenian Genocide was commemorated. Just like the First World War centenary, this anniversary has provoked a flurry of academic and public interest in what remains a highly contested history. This article assesses the state of the current historiography on the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. It focuses on the possibilities for moving beyond the national narratives which continue to dominate the field, in particular through connecting the case of the Armenian Genocide to what has been termed a ‘transnational turn’ in the writing of the history of the First World War

Space as method: field sites and encounters in Beijing’s green belts

Great urban transformations are diffusing across the Global South, removing the original landscape of urban margins to make of them a new urban frontier. These processes raise questions of both validity and legitimacy for ethnographic practice, requiring critical reflection on both spatiality and method in fieldwork at the urban margins. This article draws on fieldwork experience in Beijing’s green belts, which could also be labeled the city’s urban margin or frontier, to reflect on the space-time of encounter in the field. I aim to demonstrate how space foregrounds not only our bodily experiences but also ethnographic investigations of the daily life, and hence becomes a method. Beijing’s green belts symbolise a historical-geographical conjuncture (a moment) emerging in its urban metamorphosis. Traditional endeavours (immanent in various spatial metaphors) to identify field sites as reified entities are invalidated over the course of the space-time encounter, requiring a relational spatial ontology to register such dynamics. The use in fieldwork of DiDi Hitch, a mobile app for taxi-hailing and hitchhiking, reveals the spatiotemporal construction of self-other relations needing recognition via the dialectics of the encounter. In this relational framework, an encounter is never a priori but a negotiation of a here-and-now between different trajectories and stories as individuals are thrown together in socially constructed space and time

On the Dialogics of the Architectonic Answerability: Is Architecture a Text?

Peer Reviewe

Dialogism : Bakhtin and his world

Londonxiii, 204 p.; 20 cm