The Transformation Of The Chronotope In Literature Of The Digital Age: The Dialectic Of Virtual Space And Real Time

Abstract

This article examines how the digital condition transforms the literary chronotope—Bakhtin’s compound of temporality and spatiality—by staging a dialectic between virtual space and real time. While narratives have always mediated the relation between lived places and experienced durations, the rise of networked media, mobile interfaces, and platformed sociality has altered what counts as “here” and “now” inside fictional worlds. Building on narratology, media theory, and close readings of contemporary prose and electronic literature, the study argues that digital-era texts reconfigure the chronotope along four interlinked vectors: the persistence of liveness within asynchronous systems; the relocation of setting into layered, hybridized spaces that combine GPS coordinates, data traces, and remembered streets; the diffusion of authorial and readerly agency across interfaces that leak into narrative form; and the intensification of documentary microgenres—screenshots, notifications, chat logs—that inscribe infrastructural time into the diegesis. These changes do not merely modernize setting; they redistribute narrative attention from linear causality to patterned simultaneity, from topographical description to procedural environment design, and from omniscient oversight to curatorial authorship. The results reveal a new family of chronotopes—feed, scroll, dashboard, cloud, checkpoint, archive—that coexist with and reframe classical ones such as road, threshold, and salon. The article concludes that the digital chronotope is not the negation of embodied reality but a dynamic interface where virtual space and real time mutually constrain and illuminate one another, opening pedagogical avenues for teaching close reading across media and methodological paths for integrating platform analysis into literary study.