Beyond the Chronotope: Reading Thematically across Temporal and Geographic Boundaries

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel aims to respond to or work around Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, or the loose relation between time and space in the synthesis of literature, the materialization of culture, and the generation of meaning. These papers address topics that transcend a single era, a single geography, or at times both axes, in order to make arguments and draw continuities on a larger and more concrete scale. Significance and materiality thus manifest in the resonances across spaces, and these close readings demonstrate the ways in which the chronotope, while at times useful, can also limit available methodologies or approaches to genre and theory.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Ilaria Sicari, Ca' Foscari U of Venice (Italy)

Papers

• Bells of Eternity - James Browning, Harvard U

• Networking across Centuries: How Structures of Literary Connections Inform Verbal Cultures - Anna Ivanov, Harvard U

• Viktor Fink’s Play 'The New Homeland' as the Historical Inversion of the Promised Land - Byungsam Jung, Syracuse U

• Affective Horses: Nationalism-Enabling Topos between Dostoevsky and Tarkovsky - Eric Kim, Stanford U

Discussant

• Jinyi Chu, Yale U