Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the novelistic chronotope emerges from simple observation: that our experience of time is always spatial, and that the novel, as a representative and narrative form, is a vehicle of such spatialization. But Bakhtin’s idea also implies a plurality of chronotopes available to the novel – the road, the provincial town, the salon, the threshold – each of which posits a distinct conception of space and time and a different kind of subject. Franco Moretti puts it illuminatingly: “What happens depends on where it happens ... It could be the slogan of Bakhtin’s chronotope."

This panel asks: how do these principles of multiplicity and contingent meaning fare when confronted with the mother of all events: species extinction? If chronotopes reflect how humans inhabit and make sense of the world, what becomes of this structure when time is spatialized in terms of simple scarcity, and when the subject in question is constructed precisely by its pending disappearance? 

In Planetary Longings (2022), Mary Louise Pratt considers the Anthropocene as just one of several possible chronotopes specific to the age of climate change. Central to her discussion is a sense of the concept’s “fatal limitation”: that it leaves “the anthropo- in its place.” The Anthropocene chronotope, she argues, “offers mainly a story, a structure of desire, whereby humankind undertakes to redeem itself by acting on nature in different ways than it has in the past, thus rescuing both nature and itself.” For Pratt, that story depends on, and reiterates, the notions of agency and mutuality implied in the model of “man acting on nature.” 

Following Pratt’s analysis, we invite papers that address the viability and potential for a continuing plurality of chronotopic formations in the face of imminent species extinction. The central questions to be addressed include the following: can the spatiotemporal architecture of the novel survive the age of climate catastrophe, and if so, how? Does climate change spell the consolidation of all prior chronotopes into a single, inescapable one shaped by the calamity of extinction, or can literature still sustain multiple chronotopic possibilities, even within narratives of ecological collapse? How do the chronotopes of climate extinction, and the subjects they construct, compare to earlier narrative responses to world-ending events, such as the biblical deluge or nuclear apocalypse?