This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on (...) the particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)

Au milieu du bouillonnement intellectuel des années vingt en U.R.S.S., Mikhaïl Bakhtine, philosophe et critique littéraire, sʹinterroge sur les rapports entre lʹidéologie, le langage et le psychisme. Refusant la dichotomie saussurienne langue / parole, qui vide la pratique linguistique de sa substance, il affirme la nature sociale du signe et pose les fondements dʹune linguistique de lʹénonciation en tant que manifestation sociale et non individuelle. Au signe figé, réduit à nʹêtre quʹun "signal", il oppose le signe mouvant, changeant, arène où (...) se jouent les conflits sociaux. Publié en 1929 à Leningrad sous le nom de Volochinov, élève de Bakhtine, cet ouvrage paraît pour la première fois sous le nom de son véritable auteur. -- Back cover. (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin aimed to invent a phenomenology of the self-experience and of the experience of the other in his early work. In order to realize such a phenomenology he combined different approaches he called idealism and materialism / naturalism. The first one he linked to Edmund Husserl, but did hardly name him directly concerning his phenomenology. Does this intersubjective phenomenology give a hint that Bakhtin used Husserlian ideas more than considered yet? Or did they both invent similar (...) ideas independently from each other? Both thinkers dealt with the issue of intersubjectivity. Husserl judged statements on other psycho-physical realities as metaphysics in the Logical Investigations II, but in his Ideas I he described the others as enhancing one’s experience through their “experiential surpluses”. In the same way Bakhtin described the unique perspective of the other as a mandatory and valuable part of the world of the act in his Philosophy of the Act and his investigations on Author and Hero. In order to understand the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology for Bakhtin’s early philosophy we need to take a look closer at those contentual parallels as well as some paraphrases yet unnoticed. This gives hint for the question if for Bakhtin Husserl was more than just a name dropped. In this article I reconstructed the relations between both thinkers and answered the question if the dating of Bakhtin’s early work until 1928 has to be re-considered. (shrink)

The language theory of Mikhail Bakhtin does not fall neatly under any single rubric - 'dialogism,' 'marxism,' 'prosaics,' 'authorship' - because the philosophic foundation of his writing rests ambivalently between phenomenology and Marxism. The theoretical tension of these positions creates philosophical impasses in Bakhtin's work, which have been neglected or ignored partly because these impasses are themselves mirrored by the problems of antifoundationalist and materialist tendencies in literary scholarship. In Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism (...) Michael Bernard-Donals examines various incarnations of phenomenological and materialist theory - including the work of Jauss, Fish, Rorty, Althusser, and Pecheux - and places them beside Bakhtin's work, providing a contextualised study of Bakhtin, a critique of the problems of contemporary critics, and an original contribution to literary theory. (shrink)

This essay analyses the contribution of the knowledge of Greek culture in Antiquity for Mikhail Bakhtin’s achievement. It shows how the Socratic dialogue and serious-comic genres contributed to forming the novel – according do Bakhtin’s conceptions – by developing its carnavalized line. It concludes that, although Bakhtin was not properly a Hellenist, he has contributed to Ancient Greece studies, by exploring the literary creativity of Hellenist period.

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most influential theorists of philosophy as well as literary studies. His work on dialogue and discourse has changed the way in which we read texts – both literary and cultural – and his practice of philosophy in literary refraction and philological exploration has made him a pioneering figure in the twentieth-century convergence of the two disciplines. In this book, Graham Pechey offers a commentary on Bakhtin’s texts in all their complex and (...) allusive ‘textuality’, keeping a sense throughout of the historical setting in which they were written and of his own interpretation of and response to them. Examining Bakhtin’s relationship to Russian Formalism and Soviet Marxism, Pechey focuses on two major interests: the influence of Eastern Orthodox Christianity upon his thinking; and Bakhtin’s use of literary criticism and hermeneutics as ways of ‘doing philosophy by other means’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mikhail Bakhtin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and the Rhetorical Culture of the Russian Third RenaissanceFilipp SapienzaAlthough Mikhail Bakhtin figures centrally in multiculturalism, community, pedagogy, and rhetoric (Bruffee 1986; Welch 1993; Zebroski 1994; Zappen, Gurak, and Doheney-Farina 1997; Mutnick 1996; Halasek 2001, 182; see also Bialostosky 1986) many of his major ideas remain enigmatic and controversial. The elusive aspects of Bakhtin's theories exist in part because rhetoricians (...) know little about Bakhtin's own rhetorical culture. Theorists recognize this problem and call for a reworking of Bakhtin more on his own terms. This call has been made to resolve concerns about Bakhtin's ambivalence toward rhetoric. Since Bakhtin disliked rhetoric, any use of Bakhtin in rhetorical theory is largely a hybrid synthesis of his distinct ideas on poetics, prose, satire, the epic, the novel, and so forth. John Murphy proposes a reconception of Bakhtin closely built around his ambivalence and guided by the question, "what do we [rhetoricians] mean by the concept of a rhetorical tradition?" (2001, 259). The suggestion encourages rhetoricians to take Bakhtin more on his own terms than has been done in the past. Unfortunately, as the word "we" indicates, Murphy reworks Bakhtin primarily in terms of Western ideas about rhetoric. Slavists and "Bakhtinologists" in Russia argue that when talking about Bakhtin, "we" has often meant Western, obscuring the Russian cultural roots of his theories (Kozhinov 1993; Miller and Platter 1993, 118). The privileging of Western perspectives has also been criticized by scholars of other discourse cultures. Discussing American Indian rhetoric, Malea Powell argues that "we" means a Rhetorical Tradition that begins "with the Greeks, goes Roman, briefly sojourns in Italy, then shows up in England and Scotland, hops the ocean to America and settles in" (2002, 397). Differences in interpreting Bakhtin also proceed from translation difficulties between Russian and English. The Russian reader views Bakhtin in more essentialist ways as opposed to the "post-modern give-and-take" theorist of many Western [End Page 123] interpretations (Emerson 1990, 113). Read in the Russian language and from that cultural context, Bakhtin's vocabulary contains "conspicuous" elements of Orthodox Christianity and Slavic nationalist ideas (Kozhinov 1993; Mihailovic 1997) that reveal a Russian theological subtext to his ideas about community and dialogue.In this essay, I provide a reading of Bakhtin against the background of his own rhetorical culture. More specifically, I offer an analysis of an intertextual dialogue about language and community between Bakhtin and the symbolist writer Vyacheslav Ivanov. Scholars identify Ivanov as a poet, philosopher, and teacher who profoundly impacted Bakhtin (Mal'chukova 1992, 55). The Russian symbolists upheld strong nationalist ideals and a linguistic theory rooted in metaphysics (Mirsky 1972, 188). Many Slavists and Russian readers of Bakhtin suspect that Ivanov strongly influenced Bakhtin's rhetoric even though, for reasons unknown but that are suspected to be political, Bakhtin understates his debt to him (Ivanov 2001, 3). Bakhtin was not unlike his contemporaries in sharing an interest and vocabulary that addressed the major threads of symbolism. Read side by side with Ivanov's essays in Russian, Bakhtin's rhetoric displays a mixture of the European, Slavic, and Christian ideals that were in parlance among many Russian theorists in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin and Ivanov give us a glimpse of this rhetorical culture. More specifically, they help us to better understand our appropriations of Bakhtin based on an elucidation of the meaning of specific terms as they existed among Bakhtin's contemporaries.The method that I use requires translation of specific Russian passages into English. Terms and phrases are interpreted against the usage background of others in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin's Slavic-theological connections become evident through the elucidation of these intertextual references. Through this method, a common and accepted practice in Slavic literary studies, the use of key words and phrases are traced in and among texts to identify a discourse among authors and explicate its meaning.1 As Steven Mailloux points out, a "rhetorical hermeneutics" focuses on "the historical sets of topics, arguments, tropes, ideologies, and so forth" that give meaning to rhetoric (1988, 15-16). The approach is necessary due to the unique political and artistic circumstances during the early... (shrink)

Bakhtin’s view of the history of the novel, through the lens of Dostoevsky’s writing in his famous study on Dostoevsky’s poetics (1963), has had a significant impact on the way we read Dostoevsky today. On the other hand, Shestov’s original explorations of the human soul, which were drawn on his reading of Dostoevsky and made a lasting impression on his contemporaries, are still relatively unknown to the English-speaking reader. Having traced the history of the regenerations of Dostoevsky’s convictions in (...) his earlier works, in his mature writings Shestov proposed that at a time of deep crisis the human mind may acquire a new dimension, which lies beyond the limits of the comprehensible and the explicable. Building on his analysis of Dostoevsky’s life and work, a transformative shift in Shestov’s own worldview, led to significant alterations in his reading of Dostoevsky in the final years of his life.In this essay, as I draw the two thinkers into a dialogue, I try to look beyond the obvious differences in the two philosophers’ views (though I acknowledge them) and, with respect to both thinkers’ outstanding contributions to twentieth-century European culture, I attempt to discover a number of key developing points in their views derived from their shared love of Dostoevsky’s art. Contrasting Shestov’s interpretation of Dostoevsky to that of Bakhtin’s, I argue that despite their different methods, standpoints, and philosophical views, and despite the seemingly antagonizing nature of their observations, Bakhtin and Shestov arrived at a number of conclusions, which contributed to our present understanding of Dostoevsky’s worldview. (shrink)

In this introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin, Ken Hirschkop presents a compact, readable, detailed, and sophisticated exposition of all of Bakhtin's important works. Using the most up-to-date sources and the new, scholarly editions of Bakhtin's texts, Hirschkop explains Bakhtin's influential ideas, demonstrates their relevance and usefulness for literary and cultural analysis, and sets them in their historical context. In clear and concise language, Hirschkop shows how Bakhtin's ideas have changed the way we understand language and (...) literary texts. Authoritative and accessible, this Cambridge Introduction is the most comprehensive and reliable account of Bakhtin and his work yet available. (shrink)

In this essay I will argue that verbal dialogue, when realized successfully in a novel and measured by the tools appropriate to it, approximates that moment in real life we recognize as a “quickening of consciousness.”.

All of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work stands under the sign of plurality, the mystery of the one and the many. Unlike the third eye of Tibetan Buddhism, which gives those who possess it a vision of the secret unity holding creation together, Bakhtin seems to have had a third ear that permitted him to hear differences where others perceived only sameness, especially in the apparent wholeness of the human voice. The obsessive question at the heart of Bakhtin’s (...) thought is always “Who is talking?” It was his sense of the world’s overwhelming multiplicity that impelled Bakhtin to rethink strategies by which heterogeneity had traditionally been disguised as a unity. In his several attempts to find a single name for the teeming forces which jostled each other within the combat zone of the word—whether the term was “polyphony,” “heteroglossia,” or “speech communion”—Bakhtin was at great pains never to sacrifice the tension between identity and difference that fueled his enterprise. He always sought the minimum degree of homogenization necessary to any conceptual scheme, feeling it was better to preserve the heterogeneity which less patient thinkers found intolerable—and to which they therefore hurried to assign a unitizing label.Bakhtin’s metaphysical contrariness has the effect of making at times appear to be indiscriminate, as when he refused to recognize borders between biography and autobiography or, more notoriously, between speaking and writing. But, as I hope to show, these apparently cardinal distinctions are for Bakhtin only local instances of unity that participate in and are controlled by a fare more encompassing set of oppositions and differences. All this places an extra burden on those who seek an overarching design in Bakhtin’s legacy: the apparently unitizing term “Bakhtin” proves to be as illusory—or more illusory—in its ability to subsume real distinctions as any other, if we submit it to a Bakhtinian analysis. Michael Holquist is professor and chairman of the department of Slavic languages and literatures a Indiana University. With his wife, Katerina Clark, he has just completed Mikhail Bakhtin, a study of Bakhtin’s life and works, forthcoming in the autumn of 1984. He is currently working in Moscow. (shrink)

The Bakhtin Circle’s conception of language is very much still alive, still productive, in the language sciences today. My claim in this paper is that to understand the Bakhtin Circle’s continuing relevance to the language sciences, we have to look beyond the linguistic theory itself, to the philosophical groundwork laid for this project by Bakhtin in what he himself referred to as his philosophical anthropology. This philosophical anthropology, at the center of which stands an architectonics of self—other (...) relations, opens the door for a radical rethinking of what language is and how it works; a rethinking that in turn opens up and coincides with new directions being explored in the language sciences today. Within the context of Bakhtin scholarship, this paper also argues for taking Bakhtin’s early philosophical works more seriously when discussing the Bakhtin Circle’s conception of language. (shrink)

At the core of Dostoevskij's philosophy and theology lies a concept according to which the Truth (Istina) is antinomical: it contains both a thesis and its antithesis without expectation of synthesis. This concept can be traced to Eastern Patristics. After Dostoevskij, the theory of antinomies was elaborated by 20th century Russian religious thinkers such as Pavel Florenskij, Sergej Bulgakov, Nikolaj Berdjaev, Semën Frank, and Vladimir Losskij. Their ideas help us to understand that Dostoevskij's dialogism, made famous in its secular guise (...) by Bakhtin, has a theological underpinning. Dostoevskij's exposition of conflicting truths should therefore be seen not as a case of irresolvable contradiction or paradox but as an organic wholeness. (shrink)