CHRONOTOPE AND HISTORICAL MEMORY IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION

Abstract

The representation of the past in American historical fiction of the second half of the twentieth century is closely connected with the ways in which writers organize narrative time and space. This article examines the chronotope as one of the principal formal devices through which historical experience is reconstructed and reconsidered. The analysis is based primarily on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and is supplemented by Yuri Lotman’s theory of spatial boundaries, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, and Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of intimate space and memory. Six recurring configurations are considered: the road, the threshold and ship, the house, the boundary line, the opposition between cyclical and linear time, and the public square. The discussion focuses on selected novels by Charles Frazier, Michael Shaara, Charles Johnson, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Thomas Pynchon, N. Scott Momaday, Larry McMurtry, Robert Coover, and E. L. Doctorow. The analysis shows that space and time in these novels are not passive elements of setting. They participate directly in the interpretation of war, slavery, territorial expansion, modernization, racial identity, and national memory. At the same time, the relationship between spatial and temporal elements differs from one novel to another. In some works, geographical movement determines the rhythm of historical time; in others, competing concepts of time give meaning to particular spaces. The variety of these relationships suggests that late twentieth-century American historical fiction cannot be reduced to a single chronotopic model.