CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF BAKHTIN’S CHRONOTOPE
CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF BAKHTIN’S CHRONOTOPE

Summary/Abstract: Although Western academic circles have become familiar with intellectual work of Mikhail Bakhtin only a decade after his passing, its influence is impossible to underestimate. However, not only have his theories and concepts reached the Western academic thought indirectly via proxies of the likes of Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov, but they have also not been rigorously scrutinized for consistency and objectivity. Following postmodern nihilistic rebellion against the language itself by Jacques Derrida and the like, perceived as an instrument of hegemonic structures, it falls to current academicians to reevaluate modern thought, extract concise terms, concepts and categories to reconstitute contemporary unambiguous tools for research. It is in pursuit of such consistency that current research provides critical analysis of Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope exposing several logical inconsistencies and contradictions in its definition, constituents, origins and application, while recognizing its strength as going far beyond the scope of literary analysis and retaining applicability to written, theatric and cinematic traditions. Besides addressing the concept of chronotope as such, the necessity of specific distinct types of idyll is also questioned, suggesting that such could have been broken down to their more basic and more universal elements not bound to the folkloristic culture, but to the very human nature and events experienced universally regardless of literary or oral tradition.

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