Things You Don't Understand
"An idiot thinks he knows everything. A wise man knows he has much to learn." - Lao Tsu
While it is customary on the Internet to feign expertise on every subject one can quickly glean from Wikipedia, it can be a relief to admit that some things are simply beyond our comprehension. Here is your chance to admit your ignorance! In this thread, post things you do not understand.
Me first. I don't understand this philosophy blog entry that I came across through some aimless Googling: Bakhtin’s Chronotopic Events: Notes on Novelistic Space-Time
I don't generally read philosophy, particularly contemporary philosophy from Europe (namely, France). I find it inscrutable. I've come across names like Laruelle, Badiou, Deleuze, et al. With most of this stuff, I'm only slightly interested in the actual content (or anti-content, I guess, in the case of Laruelle). But I find it pretty fascinating to suddenly find the stuff I'd previously regarded as difficult suddenly seem like the epitome of lucidity and eloquence in comparison to new material I encounter. It's like discovering progressively more and more frontiers of unfathomability that I didn't know existed. It can be a useful exercise for expanding your mind.Bakhtin’s chronotope is all about the relations and implications of space-time. For Bakhtin, the chronotope “defines genre and generic distinctions,” which may explain his approach throughout the essay as well as Todorov’s own interest in Bakhtin (84-85). If we can think Bakhtin with Bergson, the chronotope can be considered a material assemblage of images with a duration that contracts them into a volume. Analyzing the various forms of chronotope leads to producing a problematics of narrative types.
Bakhtin begins by analyzing the Greek romance, which he argues “utilized and fused together in its structure almost all genres of ancient literature” (89).
For Bakhtin, time is specifically significant in this genre because it never effects change for the hero: “in it there is a sharp hiatus between two moments of biographical time, a hiatus that leaves no trace in the life of the heroes or in their personalities” (90). Bakhtin labels this “adventure-time,” which is “highly intensified but undifferentiated” (90).
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Originally Posted by Animal
