PROJECT OUTLINE

Our most recent endeavour within the Transitions Project was a study of the dynamics of the threshold, particularly of the way transactions occur on the limen. The results of this effort appear in, among others, Frejo & al. (2025), Aguirre (2025), the 9th ISLT encounter (Negotiating the Threshold, 13-14 November 2025), and a volume of essays currently in preparation. Other results are under review in various journals. An offshoot of the Transitions Project is proposed as our next initiative, Forms of the Threshold Chronotope (FTC), an unfunded project launched by the LIMEN Research Group in December 2025.
It has become increasingly clear that, short of resigning ourselves to accepting a set of divergent and often incompatible concepts of liminality, we need to view them within one single framework. But no such framework is currently available; no reliable definition of thresholds is commonly accepted either. Intuition and the dictionary tell us that a threshold is the one-dimensional line under a door; this may be too literal a conceptualisation, but figurative expressions like ‘a threshold of tolerance’ or ‘a pain threshold’ seem to suggest that a line remains at the basis of metaphorical uses of the word. One partial step forward came from the realisation that, whether or not one-dimensional, the various phenomena associated with the limen—instability, process, evolution, adaptation—were intrinsically linked to a dynamic. In view of this, we postulated that a concept of transition was central to our research, and that the spatial threshold and the temporal transition were inseparable. It then became clear that Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope could well provide the framework needed (Frejo & al. 2025).

Bakhtin defined a ‘chronotope’ as the spatiotemporal matrix out of which all novelistic narrative is fashioned. Plot, character, atmosphere and other textual aspects are all functions of the chronotope chosen. Among various other types, he adumbrated a chronotope of the threshold, the set of spatiotemporal conditions that obtain in threshold sites (Bakhtin 1937-38/1981: 248). This is a notion of great value to us inasmuch as it brings out a datum which all research into liminality must face: the spatial and temporal nature of limina. The insight, however, in turn raises a fundamental difficulty: how can we conceive of a one-dimensional line as endowed with four dimensions? Neither common sense nor classical geometry vouch for it. Doesn’t the very notion of spacetime contradict our most basic intuitions about limina? Victor Turner’s (1974: 239) synoptic definition of the limen as ‘a place that is not a place, and a time that is not a time’ makes the contradiction explicit in the form of a paradox. How does such a setting operate in practice? How do we handle it in the study of specific texts? How do we harmonise the threshold’s heterogeneous manifestations in different texts, genres, media and disciplines? Or must we posit a multiplicity of mutually irreconcilable limina, each with its own incommensurable threshold chronotope? Unless we can provide answers to these questions, our conceptualisation of the threshold will be at best nebulous, at worst unmanageable. And this is not simply a matter of ‘theory’ but of practical thinking.
While the applicability of both Bakhtin’s and Turner’s concepts to literary study is beyond question, much existing criticism, not least coming from our own experience of working with liminality, calls for a reassessment of both. Accordingly, the FTC project seeks to yoke the two notions from anthropology and literary criticism into a truly serviceable tool in the field of text studies, with special relevance to the area of speculative fiction. We do not seek a new theory so much as a practical approach to the problems posed by modulations of the spatiotemporal limen in a variety of contexts and disciplines.