Chronotopes in writing - Excerpts from a case study

This contribution presents and analyses excerpts from a case study on writing with early-career journalist Elli. The study relies on a dialogical and cultural- historical tradition of psycholinguistic theory. It starts from concepts by Jakubinskij, Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Voloshinov with special focus on Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope. In the Concluding Remarks to the 1937-38 essay on the chronotope written in 1973, Bakhtin extends his originally literary concept of space-time and gives it a language-philosophical basis. The distinction between the chronotope of writer and reader – the real or creating world – and the fictive chronotope of the text – the represented world – is taken up and elaborated in this study. The research design – a variation of autoconfrontation method – supports the ‘becoming-visible’ of various chronotopes in writing. Transcripts of the autoconfrontation dialogue and the writing episode of Elli under scrutiny give insights into the formation of chronotopes in writing and their complex relationships. Among other things, the transcripts refract spatial and timely figurations of the writing episode, Elli’s inner speech during writing, the remembered and imagined events and situations to be written about, the content of the text as it is presented and past and future episodes of writing and reading. The data-based analysis shows the complex interaction of chronotopes in writing and the role of language in their formation and identification.

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