Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime

Bakhtin proposed that novelistic “chronotopes” (depictions of place-time-and-personhood) implicitly frame readers’ acts of construing a novel’s plot and explicit content in ways that potentially transform everyday chronotopes presupposed by readers. Generalizing from the case of novels (and other genres of written discourse), this article develops an account of “cultural chronotopes,” namely depictions of place-time-and-personhood to which social interactants orient when they engage each other through discursive signs of any kind. Particular attention is given to a chronotope termed “mass mediated spacetime” and to a feature of subjectivity (the formation of “recombinant selves”) characteristic of the mass-mediated public sphere. The chronotopic phenomena explored in the seven accompanying articles (this issue) are discussed in the light of these proposals.