ABSTRACT
Bakhtin’s theoretical work consistently expressed his desire to develop a dialogic, sociohistorically situated understanding of language. Like his more familiar notions of utterance and speech genre, his discussion of the chronotope (literally time-place) reflected that project. Bakhtin (1981) suggests that chronotopes are foundational elements in a theory of language as history rather than system. Rooted in concrete events involving particular times, places, people, and actions, he argues, “language, as a treasure house of images, is fundamentally chronotopic (p. 251). In this sense, any situated activity is chronotopic. However, Bakhtin was especially interested in typified chronotopes. For example, he argued that literary (and other) genres are powerfully prefigured by the stock of typified chronotopes available to represent real time-space in texts. For Bakhtin, these chronotopes do not simply associate particular times and places with cultural events (e.g., breakfast in the morning in the kitchen), but construct subjectified, perspec-tival, motivated situations, associating plots, motifs, persons (with exterior behavior and interior consciousness), classes of objects, affective atmospheres, and evaluative orientations. In other words, these typified chronotopes invoke full narrative worlds, saturated with sociohistoric forms of life.
