On The Bridge: Class and the Chronotope of Modern Romance in an American Love Story

In the anthropology of romance in North America, little research has been done on 1) the relationship between love and society, and 2) love narratives. Drawing from Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope (1981; , ) and sociology of aesthetic taste, this article presents an exegesis of one falling-in-love narrative elicited from a young, middle-class man. As attraction develops episodically in the narrative, shared aesthetic tastes overcome perceived differences. During such moments, which I call chronotopes of modern romance, spatial and temporal boundaries break down and agency is called into question. I argue that in this case, a middleclass background not only appears to influence the tastes which lovers disclose to one another, the most conspicuous being their attraction for each other, but it also imbues the very chronotope of romance in which they do so.