“Man kann das nicht vergleichen von damals und von heute” (Clara Bartnitzki). Chronotopes, perspective and norms

Abstract

This article focuses on a certain type of discursive sequences from autobiographical interviews in which the speaker characterizes and contrasts two chronotopes: one from the past of his life and the other from his present, in which he narrates. The events described by the speakers are not part of the main storyline but belong to ‘secondary’ structures. The article uses the notion of chronotope to characterise them, relates this notion to those of Lebenswelt and mental space and questions the function of such sequences within the narrative of memory. In the interviews of the Israelkorpus, we observe that they can be presented in a rather similar way by different speakers or in different passages of the same interview, by use of recurrent resources such as: adverbs and indefinites for the description of usual events, negation, pronoun sets (ich, wir, man) for the expression of a variety of perspectives. By these means, each chronotope is characterised by a system of norms, values and typical representations by which it is opposed to another