The Postclassical Chronotope: A Narratological Inquiry

As a thought experiment, this article conjoins the approaches of two theorists with very different worldviews, Mikhail Bakhtin and Gérard Genette, in the hope of generating a model for a “postclassical chronotope” within the framework of a situated narratology. Our exploration begins with a juxtaposition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), confined to one day but structured through the characters’ movements in space, with Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), restricted to a single location but encompassing thirty-two years of time. To enrich the historical and ideological dimensions of the time-space relations, we extend our experiment to three other English-language novels that span two centuries: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017). Although the authors’ choice of novels was almost arbitrary, the insights the exploration has yielded suggest that the “postclassical chronotope” warrants further research.