The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction

In The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction, Paul Smethurst introduces a new theory of the postmodern. This is a bold attempt to synthesize a number of recent theories of space and time and to present this synthesis through the organizing metaphor of the postmodern chronotope. The term chronotope is first used in literary studies by Mikhail Bakhtin. Literally it means time-space: a matrix of potentially interchangeable spatial and temporal indices. For Bakhtin, the chronotope is an optic for reading the interplay between spatial and temporal elements in the novel. Smethurst Iatches onto the chronotope as a way of perceiving the complex spatio-temporal arrangements of the postmodern. Part I is a truly interdisciplinary survey in which Smethurst arrives at a generalized postmodern chronotope as a nexus of temporal and spatial concerns. This draws on a wide range of theories including: time-space compression (geopolitics), globalisation (economics and culture), presence of the past (architecture and heritage), loss of depth models, (philosophy), frame-breaking (film and prose fiction), Disneyfication (tourism and urban planning), de-differentiation (art), and chaos theory (physics). In Part 2, Smethurst both extends Baktin’s novelistic chronotope into the area of contemporary fiction, and connects the generalized postmodern chronotope with the chronotopes of a dozen or so postmodern novels. This survey includes works by: Peter Ackroyd, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, J.M. Coetzee, Don DeLillo, Alasdair Gray, Ian McEwan, Caryl Phillips, Graham Swift, Michel Tournier and Marina Warner.