Literary Chronotopes as a Bakhtinian Concept. Its Relevance in Proposing an Investigation on Contemporary Argentine Narrative

Abstract

This essay fundamentally develops a minute description of the
theoretical category that Bakhtin called literary chronotope
which consists of a particular way in which literary practice
shapes the perception of the dynamics of time in space starting
from the concomitant enunciative positions of the narrator and
the reader. In the Bakhtinian perspective, the different
chronotopes would be nothing more than manifestations of the
interpretation of identitary forms that cultures provide in
accumulative processes in such a way that in them the modeling
of the sociohistorical image of man, which is never homogenous,
can be read. In its polyphonic registers, the literary works give
an account of these tensions and contradictions and their motifs
constitute the concrete representation of such abstractions. It has
also been attempted to show the relevance of this category for
incipient research concerning novels that deal with the process
of the most recent military dictatorship in Argentina.