Reading the Other: Bakhtin and the Topography of Arrival in Literature

This chapter describes the topography of arrival in a literary work as de-termined by the coordination of time and space. Following upon a brief account of the existential meeting of Self and Other in The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. seventh century BCE), an exploration of the chronotopic changes in romance from Xenophon of Ephesus’s An Ephesian Tale (c. second century CE) to Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818) as outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates how synchronic influences lead to significant diachronic changes in an otherwise consistent literary form. Then, a reading of Anton Chekhov’s Lady with the Dog (1899) shows how variations in social space effectively reconstruct the topography of arrival. The result is a historical map of literary works that com-plicates the reading of difference in existential terms by illustrating the chronotopic manipulation that frames arrival.