Snow: chronotope and 'The Universe' in the novel

Abstract

"Snow" opens with Anja MacLeod, a Southern Baptist from Guilford County – and her fiancé, Isaac Mashke – a Southern Jew – uprooting from the wintery Carolinas and heading for Edinburgh, Scotland. When family tragedy prevents Anja from leaving, Isaac decides to postpone his PhD research and stay behind. But, when things spin out of control, Isaac finds himself stuck in a house hiding his Jewishness from people who would not accept it. Exploring both what it is to be Jewish in the South and lower-middle class American struggles, the novel follows Isaac as he attempts to support Anja while he navigates the complexities of a culture he struggles to understand.

"Chronotope and ‘The Universe’ within the Novel" utilizes Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘Chronotope’ (as outlined in his essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’) then examines to what degree John Fowles’s "The French Lieutenant’s Woman" and Kurt Vonnegut’s "Slaughterhouse-Five" can aid us in sharpening our sense of what constitutes something that Borghart and Bemong, in ‘Baktin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Relections, Applications, Perspectives’ (BTLC), call a ‘Generic Chronotope’. I then examine whether the idea of ‘Major’ and ‘Minor’ Chronotopes might be used to define a Generic Chronotope for ‘Metafiction’, and simultaneously, explore whether the exploration of Major or Minor Chronotope is more useful to literary analysis.