Gisela Gloor, Cuenca (Ecuador) Supervisor: Prof. Dr Rainer Grübel

"Chronotope and body time in Anna Karenina"

In Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, the chronotopic profiling of the characters has a decisive influence on the text. The fact that the body moves not only in space but also on a time axis is an aspect that has so far been largely ignored in Russian research. With his concept of space-time and the body-time that constitutes it, Tolstoy refers in advance to the spatialisation of culture in Russian modernism.

The work is divided into a theoretical (I), a text-analytical (II) and an interpretative (III) part.

(I) The theory first refers to philosophical concepts of the time, whereby a dualistic structure can be observed that continues from the Egyptians to the present day (e.g. in gender studies). A series of correlations common to both time and the body includes dualisms of male vs. female, dynamic vs. static, cyclical vs. telic. Furthermore, the reciprocal dominances of naturally given or culturally moulded time are examined. Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope theory assigns "space-time" a central axiological and genre-forming significance. The relationship between the body and time is initially applied and analysed analogously to the chronotope by means of the concept of body-time, whereby deviations arise here, especially with regard to the possible levels of analysis.

(II) In the subsequent text-analytical part, the selection of the chronotopes analysed is based on their yield in terms of dynamism or statics. Examples of this are the house and the path as prototypically static or dynamic phenomena. Other motifs that characterise space and time are subordinate to these. The primacy of cyclical over telic time and of statics over dynamics identifies the feminine as unmarked and the masculine as marked.

The body as a semiotic symptom should always keep the temporality of the body in view. Of interest are body attributes, body language, sensuality (e.g. eating as a cyclically recurring process, as an act of incorporation), sexuality (e.g. passionlessness as a renunciation of body-time behaviour with the effect of statics) as well as birth and death, which refer to the temporality of the body. Ageing is accelerated by misfortune, while happy personnages live more slowly. This phenomenon is achieved with the help of a process that I call time folding. The primacy of female over male time extends metonymically to the personnages and their bodies; both men and women with many female attributes live more happily.

(III) At the present stage of the work, three ethical manifestations prove to be axiologically relevant: the Old Testament (which also provides the motto of the novel), Plato (in particular the relationship between body and mind, e.g. in Phaidon) and Rousseau's critique of civilisation.

The central thesis of the work is that both the composition (aesthetics) and the intention of the text (ethics) are largely determined by time and the body.

Two main characters, one female and one male, dominate the events in the novel. Anna wins the aesthetic victory over Levin, who is only ethically successful, by gaining the title of the novel and her place in the composition. This can be interpreted as the primacy of the creative principle over the moral principle.

Rough structure of the work:

I. Theoretical part 1 Chronotope theory

2. the concept of body time

II. text-analytical part 3. methods of time representation in Anna Karenina

4. the body in motion

5 Body and ethics

III. Interpretative part 6 Chronotope and body time in the composition

7. relevance of chronotope and body time for the genre

Status: August 2009/gg