Bakhtin's Concept of Chronotope: An Epistemological Category?

Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope has been received by literary scholars probably with more enthusiasm than any other of his concepts, and has been widely applied in different fields of study and to literature from different periods. In the essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, which is the main source for his chronotopic thinking, Bakhtin emphasizes that chronotopes function as the basis of the historical development of genres of the novel. By now, his ideas about the chronotope have not only been drawn upon in historical poetics and the genre theory of the novel; for example reception theorists and narratologists have been able to include this Bakhtinian element in their thinking. The chronotope has proved to be a valuable tool of literary analysis, despite the fact that it is far from clear what Bakhtin actually meant by the concept, and that consequently it has been understood and used in a wide range of different ways.

Bakhtin does not use the term ‘chronotope’ before the mid-1930s. From this period we have two long essays in which ‘chronotope’ is used. The first, on the Bildungsroman, ‘The Novel of Education and its Significance in the History of Realism’, was probably written during 1936–38; ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ was written at almost the same time, during 1937–38, except for the ‘Concluding Remarks’, an addition from 1973.