Home › Glossary › Letter C

Chora

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Chora is Plato’s term for a receptacle or space that receives forms, neither purely material nor ideal. It suggests a generative, intermediary zone.

Detailed Definition
In poetry, chora evokes liminal spaces—thresholds between thought and matter, memory and presence. Poets use it to imagine creative voids where meaning gestates, often through ambiguous settings or suspended syntax that refuse fixed interpretation, honoring the indeterminate ground of poetic making.
Example
Example in poetry:
Plato’s Timaeus describes chora as cosmic matrix—echoed in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, where mythic space holds memory; Anne Carson’s Float uses fragmented “receptacles” for thought and loss; Juliana Spahr’s poetry creates textual chora through white space and polyvocality; Kathleen Jamie’s “The Stags” positions glen as chora where human and animal awareness meet; Lisa Robertson’s XEclogue reimagines pastoral as choric space for feminist revision; Dionne Brand’s Inventory evokes chora in diasporic urban landscapes where identity is held but not fixed.
Additional Notes
Chora, from Plato’s Timaeus, is a puzzling “receptacle” that receives Forms but is neither intelligible nor sensible—a third kind of being. Later thinkers (Derrida, Kristeva) revived it as a pre-symbolic, maternal space of potential. In poetry, chora appears as textual or spatial voids: white space in Susan Howe, the sea in H.D., or the “between” in Rilke. It’s useful for discussing how poems hold absence, ambiguity, or unformed desire. Not to be confused with place (topos) or setting: chora is ontological, not geographical. Professors might link it to écriture féminine or the sublime.
Also Known As
Khora Receptacle Space
Skip to main content