Sensation and Abstraction: The Station as a Modernist Chronotope

The article focusses on the station as a modernist chronotope, a privileged expression of a modern conception of time and space. A primary aim is to examine the scope of the concept of the chronotope, as presented by Mikhail M. Bakhtin and developed by a number of Bakhtin scholars. The article suggests a philosophical contextualization for his concept in the discussion about sensation and abstraction, referring to e.g. Theodor W. Adorno, Frederick Jameson, Sanford Schwartz and Patricia Waugh. Methodologically, it explores the analytical power of the concept of the chronotope in a philosophically informed close reading of some important modernist poems: Johannes V. Jensen’s ”At Memphis Station” (1906) og Ezra Pound’s ”In a Station of the Metro” (1913). The station, a nodal point of many different lines, appears in these epochal works of art as ‘the modern sublime’ in images, fusing sensation and abstraction in ‘structural mimesis’, triggering a vision of modernity in an explosive clash between city realism, myth, and cosmic nature.