School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemBakhtinian Chronotopes in the Campus Novel; and a Short Story Collection: Gutsy Little Unit( 2022)This thesis contributes to Bakhtinian chronotope studies by identifying and examining the campus chronotope produced in campus novels. In the campus novel genre, campus environs are more than simply a setting in which to locate action: the university is a geographical and psychological site that occupies a central position within the text and acts as an influential character determinant. Given that campus spatiotemporalities underpin campus novels, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope presents as an apposite analytical framework with which to study them. In the literary analysis component, I consider three distinct chronotopic forms – dominant, intervallic and motivic – to present chronotopic readings of three campus novels. Taking Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) as an exemplar campus novel, I examine the narrative opportunities afforded by the spatiotemporal constraints of the novel’s dominant campus chronotope. This examination subsequently informs the argument that competing intervallic chronotopes of campus, crime fiction and Greek tragedy create a notable chronotopic hybridity in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992). The campus chronotope also supports reframing and extending the diegetic value of Bakhtin’s staircase chronotopic motif and his established interpretation of stairways as sites of threshold and encounter. I contend that Vladimir Nabokov amplifies the stairway to the level of a stage in his campus novel Pnin (1957) by exploiting its associated spatiotemporal elements of performance, display and spectacle. In the creative component, I position the campus chronotope as a generative writing device to present a collection of interlinked short stories and flash fiction titled Gutsy Little Unit. Threaded through many of the stories is the campus chronotope in dominant, intervallic or motivic form. The collection is primarily focalised through the character of Nessie Loewe, though several characters in her orbit are protagonists in their own dedicated stories. Nabokov’s Pnin strongly influences the configuration of this short story collection; I take inspiration from its lightly comical tone and interlinked story structure of impressionistic sketches of Timofey Pnin’s life in and around a college.