The Chronotope: Performing The Novelized Museum
This dissertation discusses ways of reconceptualizing art museum objects based on a theoretical experimentation with the chronotope; a literary figuration with which philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin characterizes the spatial and temporal movements in a novel. For Bakhtin, chronotopic movement enables the reader to experience the novel as a “treasure house,” a plurality of images and ideas generating from different event encounters that occur between the narrative and broader material world. Correspondingly, in this study, differential values and meanings are constituted through an interrelationship between the museum, its objects, and its audiences. The chronotope characterizes the novelized museum as an actual treasure house in terms of its cultural and historical collections and exhibitions, and a virtual treasure house of ideas, where meanings are constituted as more than representational. Specifically, this dissertation examines how chronotopic novelized thought unfolds the complexities of encountering cultures in a state of co-existence; activates new contexts to interact with the museum differently; and, modifies predetermined understandings of objects to experience them within an entangled plurality of relations.
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