Beckett and Coetzee employ similar indeterminate and self-reflexive chronotopal strategies in their novels. Their reassertion of spatiality reconnects the two halves of the spatio-temporal framework of the chronotope in narrative. Spatial theorists like Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre, among others, have attempted to reassert issues of space in what has been an ontological and epistemological framework that has prioritized time. Lyotard's claim that postmodernism resists totalizing structures and Hutcheon's contention that it engages in a simultaneous complicity and critique inform the relationships between time and space in both Beckett's and Coetzee's text.Īdditionally, theories of postmodern space contribute to the more specific discussion of the postmodern chronotopes in both novels. The long essay uses the concept as yet another way to define the distinctiveness of the novel by means of its history, using differing ratios of time-space projection as the unit. 'Chronotope' is a category that no brief introduction (much less glossary) can adequately adumbrate. I contextualize the discussion by introducing theories of postmodernism, specifically those of Jean-François Lyotard and Linda Hutcheon. The third essay introduces one of Bakhtins coinages in its title.
This narrative creation produces what I call a "postmodern creative chronotope" that self-reflexively embraces indeterminacy at the same time that it critiques the elements that produce this indefinite relationship between time and space, a strategy that is especially postmodern. It is in the last reading that I find the essay most valuable, especially in Branham’s supplementing of Bakhtin’s own all-too-brief discussions of Petronius. In each novel, characters as authors create or discuss "inner" narratives that reflect upon the way chronotopes are created in fiction and reveal problematic aspects of those chronotopes. As for the ancient texts, Branham follows and analyzes Bakhtin’s lines of argument as he traces the chronotope in Achilles Tatius, Longus, and finally Apuleius and Petronius. The second chapter addresses the self-reflexive creation of this postmodern space within each novel's hypodiegetic narratives and discussions of narrative creation within each respective diegetic narratives. Historical examples of the biographical form are happiness-unhappiness in antiquity, hagiography, confession in the Middle Ages, a family novel of the XVIII century. Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope found in his work The Dialogic Imagination. of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel). The first chapter analyzes the indeterminate nature of postmodern space within the two novels as related to M. Here she provides a nice summary of the table of contents: Th ese categories include the Bakhtin circle’s understanding of genre, the chronotope, authoring a hero, answerability, discourse and polyphony, the surplus of seeing, the loophole, and architectonics. Coetzee's Foe-and is separated into two chapters. This study addresses two works of fiction-Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies and J.