The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction: 30 (Postmodern Studies) - Softcover

Smethurst, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9042015136 ISBN 13: 9789042015135

Publisher: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2000

Synopsis

The Postmodern Chronotope is an innovative interdisciplinary study of the contemporary. It will be of special interest to anyone interested in relations between postmodernism, geography and contemporary fiction. Some claim that postmodernism questions history and historical bases to culture; some say it is about loss of affect, loss of depth models, and superficiality; others claim it follows from the conditions of post-industrial society; and others cite commodification of place, Disneyfication, simulation and post-tourist spectacle as evidence that postmodernism is wedded to late capitalism. Whatever postmodernism is, or turns out to have been, it is bound up in rethinking and reworking space and time, and Paul Smethurst's intervention here is to introduce the postmodern chronotope as a term through which these spatial and temporal shifts might be apprehended. The postmodern chronotope constitutes a postmodern world-view and postmodern way of seeing. In a sense it is the natural successor to a modernist way of seeing defined through cubism, montage and relativity. The book is arranged as follows: * Part 1 is an interdisciplinary study casting a wide net across a range of cultural, social and scientific activity, from chaos theory to cinema, from architecture to performance art, from IT to tourism. * Part 2 offers original readings of a selection of postmodern novels, including Graham Swift's Waterland and Out of this World, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and First Light, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Marina Warner's Indigo, Caryl Phillips' Cambridge, and Don DeLillo's The Names and Ratner's Star.

About this title

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author:

Paul Smethurst is a lecturer at The University of Hong Kong. His teaching and research interests include science fiction, contemporary British fiction, postmodernism and travel literature. He is presently working on a new book on travel writing - The Idea of Travel: Critical Perspectives on Travel Writing and Place

About this edition

• Publisher: Editions Rodopi B.V.
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 9042015136
• ISBN 13: 9789042015135
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336