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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

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.”.

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)

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)

The aim of Language for those who have Nothing is to think psychiatry through the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Using the concepts of Dialogism and Polyphony, the Carnival and the Chronotope, a novel means of navigating the clinical landscape is developed. Bakhtin offers language as a social phenomenon and one that is fully embodied. Utterances are shown to be alive and enfleshed and their meanings realised in the context of given social dimensions. The organisation of this book (...) corresponds with carnival practices of taking the high down to the low before replenishing its meaning anew. Thus early discussions of official language and the chronotope become exposed to descending levels of analysis and emphasis. Patients and practitioners are shown to occupy an entirely different spatio-temporal topography. These chronotopes have powerful borders and it is necessary to use the Carnival powers of cunning and deception in order to enter and to leave them. The book provides an overview of practitioners who have attempted such transgression and the author records his own unnerving experience as a pseudopatient. By exploring the context of psychiatry's unofficial voices: its terminology, jokes, parodies, and everyday narratives, the clinical landscape is shown to rely heavily on unofficial dialogues in order to safeguard an official identity. (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)

At the core of Dostoevskij's philosophy and theology lies a concept according to which the Truth 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)

Søren Kierkegaard’s influence on the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin has received relatively little attention from Bakhtin scholars (and hardly any attention from Bakhtin scholars in the English-speaking world). Yet, as I argue in this paper, Kierkegaard was among the most important formative influences on Bakhtin's work. This influence is most evident in Bakhtin's early ethical philosophy, but remains highly relevant in later periods. Reading Bakhtin as a follower and developer of Kierkegaard's fundamental philosophical (...) insights provides us with a key to the unity of Bakhtin's thought. (shrink)

RESUMO O artigo é dedicado a um dos problemas centrais da ciência filológica moderna - o problema da palavra artística, no entendimento do qual vemos a interseção e interação frutífera da crítica literária e da linguística. O trabalho sistematiza conceitos relevantes para o estudo moderno da palavra artística, revelando sua natureza específica, bem como define as tendências gerais que são características de cada uma das abordagens existentes. A autora enfoca no conceito de palavra de Mikhail Bakhtin, que supera (...) os extremos, próprios do signo e das abordagens ontológicas, e esclarece as diferenças básicas entre as categorias de comunicação e diálogo presentes em Bakhtin. O artigo corrobora com a definição da palavra artística como uma estrutura semântica de dois vetores, na qual a comunicação-existência consiste e se desdobra. АННОТАЦИЯ Статья посвящена одной из центральных проблем современной филологической науки - проблеме художественного слова, в осмыслении которого плодотворно пересекаются и взаимодействуют литературоведение и лингвистика. В работе систематизированы актуальные для современного изучения художественного слова концепции, выявляющие его специфику, и определены общие тенденции, характерные для каждого из существующих подходов. В центре внимания автора - концепция слова М. М. Бахтина, в которой преодолеваются крайности, характерные для знакового и онтологического подходов, прояснены базовые отличия бахтинских категорий общения и диалога. Обосновано определение художественного слова как двухвекторной смысловой структуры, в которой заключается и развертывается бытие-общение. ABSTRACT The article is devoted to one of the central problems of modern philological science - the problem of the artistic word, in the understanding of which we see the fruitful intersection and interaction of literary criticism and linguistics. The work systematizes the concepts relevant for the modern study of the artistic word, revealing its specific nature, and defines the general tendencies characteristic of each of the existing approaches. The author focuses on the word concept by M. M. Bakhtin, which overcomes the extremes, characteristic of the sign and ontological approaches, and clarifies the basic differences between Bakhtin's categories of communion and dialogue. The article substantiates the definition of the artistic word as a two-vector semantic structure, in which being-communion consists and unfolds. (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin has gained a reputation of a thinker and literary theorist somehow hostile to poetry, and more specifically to the epic. This view is based on texts, in which Bakhtin creates and develops a conceptual contrast between poetry and the novel (in "Discourse in the Novel") or between epic and the novel (in "Epic and Novel"). However, as I will show, such perceptions of Bakhtin's position are grounded in a misunderstanding of Bakhtin's writing strategy (...) and philosophical approach. Bakhtin often draws such conceptual contrasts as the ones between epic and novel, but does so not in order to characterize pre-given phenomena (in this case, the epic and the novel as two groups of literary works), but to construct a conceptual space which he in turn uses to explicate elements of his philosophy. (shrink)