Thematic Issue 38/3: Chronotopic dimensions of women's life writings

This issue aims to investigate the discursive construction of life stories written by women, considering the influence of different chronotopic dimensions on the constitution of discourses.

In the sense of Bakhtin and the Circle, language is constituted in a dual perspective, both by verbal elements, internal to the forms of language, and by extraverbal elements (time, space, values, ideologies, history, culture, etc.), the latter influencing interaction and delimiting the construction of discourses.

From this premise, in line with the discussions of Machado (2010) and Santos (2023), the concept of chronotope proposed by Bakhtin (at different points in his production) allows us to identify, from verbal marks, how extraverbal elements define the constitution of language.  

By chronotope we mean the fusion of space-time elements and how they condition and place value on discourse, giving visibility to correlations between the conditions of "saying", who says it, how it is said, what is said (or even who cannot say it, what cannot be said, etc.), as a function of the chronotopic dimensions (space-time) that mark a given use of language.

In the context of the adventure novel, for example, Bakhtin suggests the "chronotope of the roads" as a space-time in which the encounters and events of the plot occur. The author also proposes the "chronotope of the house", in the biographical novel, as a space that indicates a certain stability, while highlighting the factor of transformation in the construction of the characters. When thinking about the first autobiographical forms and their space-time dimensions, Bakhtin (2018) sees two distinct chronotopes: the "internal chronotope", the space-time of the represented life, and the "real external chronotope" or "external chronotope of the report" in which the represented life takes place, whether it is that of a third party (biography) or that of the speaker himself (autobiography). We can also think of the "external chronotope of the reported facts", the space-time in which the events reported are situated and take shape (Santos, 2023, p. 61-62).

In general terms, our focus is to investigate how space and time dimensions are discursively constructed in the different life stories written by women and how these two variables (space-time) also shape the conditions of production, reception and discursive circulation of these stories. We are therefore interested in reflecting on the singularities in the way the discursive elements, in different chronotopes, mark the life narratives produced by women in various socio-historical-cultural contexts.

We expect contributions that investigate life stories in the most diverse forms of language and linguistic-discursive materials (written, oral, audiovisual, digital, among others). Likewise, we seek to gather works that investigate female authorship in the breadth of the inscriptions of the term "woman", regarding the different definitions of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, culture, language, etc.

By means of illustration, but not exhaustively, we present some topics and questions to be considered:

• How do the primary chronotopic conditions of the narrated events influence the discursive construction of women's life narratives?
• How does the space-time in which the works were produced delimit the production, reception, and/or circulation of discourses in women's life narratives? How does the social, historical and cultural position of women in this external chronotope shape the construction of the narrative?
• How does the space-time constructed in the life narratives allow for the visualization of the interrelation of formal, stylistic, and thematic aspects in the construction of discourses?
• Which internal chronotopes are most significant in the internal construction of women's life narratives in their various inscriptions?
• How do the external chronotopic dimensions relate to the internal chronotopic dimensions of women's life narratives?
• How do the internal/external chronotopes of different women's life narratives interrelate in the elements of their discursive constitution?

As such, this thematic issue is open to contributions from researchers who, regardless of their area of expertise, investigate the space-time dimensions in the discursive construction of life stories written by women.

 

The Linha D’Água journal welcomes submissions in Portuguese, English, French or Spanish. To access the submission guidelines, please click on https://www.revistas.usp.br/linhadagua/about/submissions

 

Linha D'Água is indexed in: Web of Science - Clarivate (ESCI), MLA, MIAR, Latindex, REDIB, Linguistic Bibliography, DOAJ, among others.

 

Submission deadline closed: April 30th, 2025.

Expected Publication: December 2025.

 

 

Guest Editors:

Vânia Lúcia Menezes Torga
vltorga@uol.com.br
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz (UESC), Brazil.

Vanessa Fonseca Barbosa
vanessafonbar@usp.br
Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Brazil.

Yuri Andrei Batista Santos
batista.yuriandrei@gmail.com
Université Paris Cité, France.

Girlandia Gesteira Santos
girlandiagesteira@yahoo.com.br
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz (UESC), Brasil.

Ana Cláudia Guimarães Senna
anaguisenna@hotmail.com
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz (UESC), Brasil.