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Article Wartime Spaces in Elizabeth Bowen's “sunday Afternoon”(Ovidius University, 2021) Elbir,N.B.This article examines the treatment of space and time in the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen's wartime short story “Sunday Afternoon” (1941), to discuss how the use of spatiality and spatial images in the narrative discourse of the story enables her to convey the social and physical reality of the Second World War, and the psychological, interior states and anxietiesof her characters, revealing their sense of dislocation and disorientation caused by wartime conditions. My argument is inspired mainly by Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the “chronotope” and Gaston Bachelard's definition of the house as “psychic space.” The protagonist of the story is an Anglo-Irish man who is on a visit to his old friends in Ireland from London, where his home has been destroyed by the Blitz. He is soon to return to his Ministry job in blitzed London and to an uncertain and frightening future. I argue that the setting of the story, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy big house and its environs in neutral Ireland, becomes a Bakhtinian chronotope where, as Bakhtin putsit, “time, asit were, thickens, takeson flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (84), and the house portrayed as a familiar and well-remembered space that takes the protagonist back to his past functions as an image that, in Bachelard's words, “bespeaks intimacy”(72). Thus, the depiction of wartime spaces in “Sunday Afternoon” gains historical and personal significance that merges the past, present and future, and serves to emphasize the convergence of public and private moments of crisis. © 2021 Ovidius University. All rights reserved.Article A Bakhtinian Perspective for the Chronotopic Evaluation of Symbols in “hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway(Ovidius University, 2024) Aksoy, N.B.This paper discusses the metaphoric and spatial representations in the short story “Hills Like White Elephants” from the perspective of Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. Bakhtin explains the concept of chronotope in literary texts as the intersection of space and time configured either in abstract or concrete entities, represented by symbols and metaphors or real-time objects and spaces. In the story, an unmarried pregnant girl and the child's father are portrayed at a train station discussing their and their unborn child's future. The story reflects the qualities of a typical Hemingway style, the “iceberg theory” he favours in storytelling. The train station in the story is located at the intersection of railway lines in the direction of Barcelona and Madrid, and this location becomes a symbol of the decision the couple will make at that particular historical time about keeping or aborting the baby. The station is situated between a patch of dry brown land and long and white hills across the fertile valley of the Ebro river, where the characters are about to decide whether to go back to their old, barren life or keep the baby and move on to a promising and happy life. This spatial juncture, the train station, symbolizing a public space of modernity, and the contrasting hills like white elephants, symbolizing the personal dilemma of the pregnant girl, intersect in the characters’ lives and illustrate Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. This particular chronotope reveals the conflict and tension between the hills like white elephants and the train station near the barren, dry, brown earth, as well as between the woman and man in their perceptions of their lives and future together. © 2024 Ovidius University. All rights reserved.
