Duped by an ass: Revisiting the chronology of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (original) (raw)

`It was not Death’: The Poetic Career of the Chronotope

When we talk about what Bakhtin called "literary-artistic chronotopes," we tend to talk about narratives, particularly prose narratives. 1 Bakhtin developed the concept of the chronotope via an historical, cross-cultural and teleological study of the novel, and as Emerson and Morson note, "the chronotope essay and related writings were part of Bakhtin's great project of his third period to elucidate and exalt the genre of the novel" (372). Though Bakhtin asserted that all language is inherently chronotopic, both Bakhtin and later chroniclers of the life of the chronotope have found that prose narratives most readily exemplify those "fusion[s] of [spatial and temporal] indicators" through which literary "[t]ime … thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible" and literary "space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history" (84).

Space, Time and Narrative: Bakhtin and Ricoeur

In the preface to the second volume of Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur's monumental study of the philosophical, historical and hermeneutic implications of the configuration of time in literature, the author describes the intrinsic paradox of examining what he refers to as the 'fictive experience of time':

BAKHTIN'S THEORETICAL MODEL OF CHRONOTOPE: FORMS OF TIME AND CHRONOTOPE IN THE NOVEL

Bakhtin’s Theorical Model of Chronotope, 2016

Mikhail Bakhtin, with his notions of Dialogism, Polyphony, Chronotope, Carnival and so forth, was one of the most important theorists of discourse in the twentieth century. The theory of chronotope, which was introduced as part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, made a significant contribution not only to the mathematics but also to the literary scholarship. In this article, based on his essay Forms of Time and Chronotope in The Novel (one of the four essays in his book, The Dialogic Imagination [first published as a whole in 1975]), most important types of chronotopes classified according to such kinds of literary genres are mentioned and compared at some points. Keywords: Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and Chronotope, François Rabelais, Literary criticism

THE STRUCTURALIST READING OF IN EVIL HOUR (1962) AS AN ACHRONIC NARRATIVE REDEFINING PARADIGMS OF TIME AND STORY-TELLING

Time is most important ingredient for a text as for its existence; structure, meaning and understanding is concerned. It is also impossible to go beyond time. Since the time of genesis, the paradigms of time have undergone different interpretations which have resulted in equally different understandings of life and literature. In this paper, Garcia Marquez’s novel In Evil Hour (1962) has been analyzed in the light of narratological concepts of ‘story time’ and ‘narrative time’ as has been discussed by Gerard Genette in his book Narrative Discourse: Essay in Method (1983). Lilla Kopar’s concept of ‘figurative time’ enumerated in his famous paper titled “An Intellectual Dialogue Set In Stone” and Genette’s concept of ‘achrony’ best describe the timeless and temporal structure of the novel. Figuratively speaking, time in the novel is both linear and non-linear. Moreover, it would not be incorrect to say that the concept of time in the novel is above the concepts of linearity and nonlinearity. Time in the novel is circular cyclic and repetitive. A structuralist reading of the novel makes it clear that the ‘story time’ of the novel is purely and simultaneously psychological, magical, fantastic and realistic phenomenon. The ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ of the novel displays that nothing has changed since the beginning of human generation because human beings are still subject to similar pains and pleasures of life and are still possess same instincts. Structurally, the novel is an instance of ‘iterative narrative’ which uses ‘achrony’ and ‘iterative syllepsis’ as the techniques of representing its temporal and timeless paradigms playing fundamental role in its interpretation, understanding and meaning. In this way, the novel breaks away from what is logical and normal simultaneously questions the paradigms of modern constructs of time and reality. Key words: anachrony, achrony, itera

THE NATURE OF THE CHRONOTOPE OF PLACE

In the 18 th century Voltaire wrote that "every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time." His words were reiterated by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain: "A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries." This principle of individual's inherent immersion into his temporal and spatial surroundings was delineated in literature by Mikhail Bakhtin in 20 th century. Much like its human maker, a work of literature is engrossed in time and space and harbors within its pages a cross section of these two factors. Moreover, the very act of interpretation of a book is chronotopic in itself, which leads us to the well-known conclusion that each reading is unique. If we were to borrow and alter Heraclitus's byword, it would read: "No reader ever steps into the same river twice, for neither is the book the same, nor is the reader." The reader's change is obvious since, in our childhood, a book is a mere physical object, whose intended content cannot be accessed; as young men we cannot possibly penetrate all its layer of meaning, while in old age we have been to a great extent done away with the need for