From Narrative to Reality: The Inter/Trans Discourse of Bakhtin’s Chronotopes and Lyotard’s Metanarratives

Abstract

Examining the historical and social geography of a nation requires studying the time and the space so as to give rise to a discourse exploring how people interact with each other as well as with their nation. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope unveils how the inter/trans textual and contextual relationships of narrative time and space intersect with historical moments to generate interactive involvement with certain temporal and geographical scales in the real world. Discussing the chronotopicity of a society is also associated with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of metanarratives (aka grand narratives); his ideologies are complementary to Bakhtin’s use of the chronotope as an analytical lens; theirs is an inter/trans discourse. The paper seeks to underline the interactive inter/trans discourse between reality and literary narratives from an intertwined Bakhtinian and Lyotardian approach. The article also attempts to accentuate the homogeneity of the concepts of the chronotope and metanarrative because an interactive chronotopic-metanarrative approach facilitates involvement with the reality and makes the oscillation between the fictional and the real possible.