Heterotopia

The present paper studies J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Jafar Modarres Sadeqi’s Gavkhuni ( The Marsh ) (1362 [1983]) through a spatial perspective. To this end, the study avails itself of a constellation of concepts formed around Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope. Reading the selected novels through these key terms shows that despite striking differences concerning the nature and manifestation of space, both novels configure space as belonging to the realm of the father. In Life & Times of Michael K , Michael begins a journey across South Africa to escape this paternal realm, while the unnamed narrator of Gavkhuni , having failed to escape the memory of Isfahan even after moving to Tehran, starts to write to get rid of his nightmares about his father. At the end of the novels, both protagonists return to their first places: Cape Town and Tehran, respectively. However, as the beginning and ending points of the novels, these cities do not remain the same for them: Michael preserves his identity as a gardener even in Cape Town, and the narrator of Gavkhuni reconciles with the ever-present image of the father and Zayandehrud in Tehran through writing.  

This article examines heterotopia as a multimodal frontier in Samuel Beckett’s play That Time (1976), defining the concept through a Foucauldian lens. The article investigates the text of the play as a critical site that accommodates internal and external modes of spatial criticism, introducing mnemonic and external heterotopic sites, respectively. The play transforms into a critical locus that enables the artist to reconfigure spatiality and temporal locationality of certain places in Ireland by revisiting them through three fragmented voices. The article argues that the play not only disrupts conventional modes of storytelling set against a backdrop of descriptively relatable places but also challenges the audiences’ relationship with how memorialized times and spaces can reshape the historicity of lived experiences. The reshaped place is neither pure fabrication nor a byproduct of real-time simulation, but a product of conscious re-imagination cast across space-time continuum. As such, time is stretched across spatial continuum as much as one's memory deems necessary. The synchronic entanglement of memory and temporality transforms That Time into a site of epistemic inquiry, and changes the conventions of temporal progression. The play, the article concludes, expands spatial and temporal horizons simultaneously by considering episodic memories as well as visceral experiences.