Mikhail Bakhtin And Walter Benjamin

This first comparative study of the philosophers and literary critics, Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin, focuses on the two thinkers' conceptions of experience and form, investigating parallels between Bakhtin's theories of responsibility, dialogue, and the novel, and Benjamin's theories of translation, montage, allegory, and the aura.

Explores and illuminates the impact of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin on our understanding of literary modernism. This volume explores the subject of modernism as seen through the lens of Bakhtinian criticism and in doing so offers a rounded and up-to-date example of the application of Bakhtinian theory to a field of research. The contributors consider the global spread of modernism and the variety of its manifestations as well as modernism's relationship to popular culture and its collective elaboration, which are dominant concerns in Bakhtin's thinking. As with other volumes in the Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series, the volume is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides readings of Bakhtin's work in the context of literary modernism. Part 2 features case studies of modernist art and artists and their relation to Bakhtinian theory. The final part provides a glossary of key terms in Bakhtin's work.

A critique of cultural studies that invokes Bakhtin, Benjamin, and de Man.

Antonio Gramsci and his concept of hegemony have permeated social and political theory, cultural studies, education studies, literary criticism, international relations, and post-colonial theory. The centrality of language and linguistics to Gramsci's thought, however, has been wholly neglected. In Gramsci's Politics of Language, Peter Ives argues that a university education in linguistics and a preoccupation with Italian language politics were integral to the theorist's thought. Ives explores how the combination of Marxism and linguistics produced a unique and intellectually powerful approach to social and political analysis. To explicate Gramsci's writings on language, Ives compares them with other Marxist approaches to language, including those of the Bakhtin Circle, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School, including Jürgen Habermas. From these comparisons, Ives elucidates the implications of Gramsci's writings, which, he argues, retained the explanatory power of the semiotic and dialogic insights of Bakhtin and the critical perspective of the Frankfurt School, while at the same time foreshadowing the key problems with both approaches that post-structuralist critiques would later reveal. Gramsci's Politics of Language fills a crucial gap in scholarship, linking Gramsci's writings to current debates in social theory and providing a framework for a thoroughly historical-materialist approach to language.

Contemporary critical thinking was founded by Karl Marx approximately a century and a half ago. Later, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, various critical thinkers (some Marxist, others not) further developed this perspective in studying the most important issues of their day: for instance, the future death of art, the conditions and limitations of how we understand and perceive time, the essential questions of how popular culture functions and expresses itself, the role of popular protest and the "moral economy of the crowd", the limits and crises facing modern bourgeois reason and how to characterize today's capitalist world. This book is a careful, rigorous review of these fundamental lessons in critical theory and critical thought as developed by some of the most important social thinkers of our age: Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Fernand Braudel, Mikhail Bakhtin, E. P. Thompson, Carlo Ginzburg and Immanuel Wallerstein.

The first book to examine in detail Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History Benjamin's collection of fragments, Theses on the Philosophy of History, play a determining role in how Benjamin's thought is understood, as well as in the debate about the interplay between politics, history and time. Walter Benjamin and History is the first volume to give access to the themes and problems raised by the Theses, providing valuable exegetical and historical work on the text. The essays collected here are all the work of noted Benjamin scholars, and pursue the themes central to the Theses.

The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art, and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps, and fragments of everyday life, art, and dreams. Throughout his life, Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artifacts, assortments of images, texts, and signs, themselves representing experiences, ideas, and hopes, each of which was enthusiastically logged, systematized, and analyzed by their author. In this way, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the salvaging of his own legacy. Intricate and intimate, Walter Benjamin's Archive leads readers to the heart of his intellectual world, yielding a rich and detailed portrait of its author.

Challenges postmodernist theories of language and politics which detach language from human bodies and their material practices.