The Novelness Of Bakhtin

During the last 30 years, the Russian thinker M. M. Bakhtin has achieved great international recognition for his work with - among other subjects - literary theory and philosophy of language, and inspiration from his research is to be seen in almost all fields of the human sciences. However, Bakhtin's authorship focused primarily on one particular phenomenon: the novel. In this book, the world's leading Bakhtin scholars discuss Bakhtin's special understanding of the novel, both in relation to the status the novel occupies in the existing theoretical and philosophical debate, and in the historical context in which it was created. Articles such as Michael Holquist's Why is God's Name a Pun - Bakhtin's Theory of the Novel and Theo-Philology and Derek Littlewood's Epic and Novel in Magic Realism have been revised and augmented for the publication.

These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)—known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky—as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology. Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) has become a name to conjure with. We know this because he is now one of those thinkers everyone already knows-without necessarily having to read much of him! Doesn't everyone now know how polyphony functions, what carnival means, why language is dialogic but the novel more so, how chronotopes make possible any concrete artistic cognition and that utterances give rise to genres that last thousands of years, always the same but not the same? Like Marx and Freud in the twentieth century, or Plotinus and Plato in the fourth, a familiarity with Bakhtin's thinking is so commonly assumed, at least in the Humanities, as to be taken for granted. He is no longer an author but a field of study in his own right. As Craig Brandist (of the Bakhtin Centre at Sheffield University) reports: the works of the [Bakhtin] Circle are still appearing in Russian and English, and are already large in number...There are now several thousand works about the Bakhtin Circle.The freedom given to contributors to address any text or topic under the general rubric of The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative has produced a remarkable variety of essays ranging widely over different periods, genres, and cultures. While most of the contributors chose to explore Bakhtin's theory of genre or to take issue with his account of one genre, Greek romance, the remaining contributions defy such convenient categories. What all the essays share with one another (and those collected in Bakhtin and the Classics) is the attempt to engage Bakhtin as a reader and thinker.

The Russian critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin is once again in favor, his influence spreading across many discourses including literature, film, cultural and gender studies. This book provides the most comprehensive introduction to Bakhtin’s central concepts and terms. Sue Vice illustrates what is meant by such ideas as carnival, the grotesque body, dialogism and heteroglossia. These concepts are then placed in a contemporary context by drawing out the implications of Bakhtin’s writings, for current issues such as feminism and sexuality. Vice’s examples are always practically based on specific texts such as the film Thelma and Louise, Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend and James Kelman's How late it was, how late.

Michael Holquist's masterly study draws on all of Bakhtin's known writings, providing a comprehensive account of his achievement. This edition includes a new introduction, concluding chapter and a fully updated bibliography.

This wide-ranging treatment of Bakhtin's cultural and literary theory tests, compares, and explores his work in relation to colonialism, feminism, reception theory, and theories of the body. Many of the essays in the first edition have become standard reference points in cultural debate. This revised second edition takes advantage of the wealth of new Bakhtin material which became available after perestroika. New articles make use of previously unacknowledged sources of Bakhtin's theory of dialogue; they also vividly recount the dramatic events surrounding his thesis on Rabelais, and interrogate his famous distinction between poetry and the novel.

Art and Answerability, the work that would become Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary manifesto, was first published in Den Iskusstva (The Day of the Art) on September 13, 1919. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology: Art and Answerability celebrates one hundred years of Bakhtin’s heritage. This unique book examines the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtinin a variety of disciplines.To articulate the enduring relevance and heritage of the varied works of Bakhtin, sixteen scholars from eight countries have come together, and each has brought his/her unique perspective to the subject. Bakhtin’s work in aesthetics, moral philosophy, linguistics, psychology, carnival, cognition, contextualism, and the history and theory of the novel are present here, as understood by a wide variety of distinguished scholars.