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Bakhtin and Religion
A Feeling for Faith
Susan M. Felch and Paul J. Contino
Northwestern University Press, 2001
The dimension of religion in the life and work of Bakhtin has been fiercely contested--and willfully ignored--by critics. Unique in its in-depth focus on this subject, Bakhtin and Religion brings together leading British, American, and Russian scholars to investigate the role of religious thought in shaping and framing Bakhtin's writings.

These essays provide an overview of Bakhtin's attitude toward religion in general and Russian Orthodoxy in particular, addressing topics ranging from how Bakhtin's religious ideas informed his linguistic and aesthetic theories to the idea of love in his secular and religious thought and to the religious component of Bakhtin's theory of laughter.
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Bakhtin and the Classics
R. Bracht Branham
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Mikhail Bakhtin's critical and theoretical experiments have inspired original work in the humanities and social sciences, but Bakhtin and the Classics is the first book to focus on the relationship between Bakhtin and classical studies, the discipline in which Bakhtin himself was trained. Clearly demonstrating the fundamental importance of classical literature in his work, Bakhtin and the Classics expands our understanding of both Bakhtin's thought and the literary and cultural history of antiquity. 

The authors, eminent classicists and distinguished critics of Bakhtin, put Bakhtin into dialogue with the classics--and classicists into dialogue with Bakhtin. Each essay offers a critical account of an important aspect of Bakhtin's thought and examines the value of his approach in the context of literary or cultural history. Beginning with an overview of Bakhtin's notion of carnival laughter, perhaps his central critical concept, the volume explores Bakhtin's thought and writing in relation to Homer's epic verse. Catullus's lyric poetry, ancient Roman novels, and Greek philosophy from Aristotle's theory of narrative to the work of Antiphon the Sophist. The results are of interest and importance to Bakhtinians, theorists, and classicists. 
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The Bakhtin Circle
Philosophy, Culture and Politics
Craig Brandist
Pluto Press, 2002
Mikhail Bakhtin and the group of thinkers known as the Bakhtin Circle have had a massive influence on contemporary literary and cultural theory. Bakhtin is recognised as perhaps the key theorist on the novel as a genre, and his writings on carnival in popular culture are a recurrent theme in cultural studies. The influence of the Circle has recently spread into social theory, philosophy and psychology, which means that a narrow literary approach is now inadequate for fully understanding the breadth of their ideas. Moreover, recent research has revolutionised our understanding of the work of the Bakhtin Circle and retranslation has shown that many of the existing translations are significantly flawed. It is also now clear that the work of the Circle was the product of discussions between members of an extraordinary group of scholars.

This is the first book to bring together this significant new research on the Circle, setting it within a historical and intellectual context and emphasising the importance of the work of the Circle as a whole. Craig Brandist offers a new look at the significance of Bakhtin's legacy, and brings into clearer focus the contribution of others in the circle--including Voloshinov, Medvedev, Pumpianskii and Kagan--whose work has so often been obscured, assessing the fundamental role they played in shaping Bakhtinian thought.
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Bakhtin
Essays and Dialogues on His Work
Edited by Gary Saul Morson
University of Chicago Press, 1986

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Bakhtin in Contexts
Across the Disciplines
Amy Mandelker
Northwestern University Press, 1995
The Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin has recently become a major figure in contemporary theory beyond his traditional influence in Slavic literary studies. Bakhtin in Contexts explores the revolutionary impact Bakhtin's ideas have carried in contemporary discussion of language, art, culture, and social science in recent years. The contributors represent a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, epitomizing the views of Russian and American specialists in those fields Bakhtin often referred to as "the human sciences." The diversity of perspective and flexibility of approach make this a unique contribution to Bakhtin studies and to the ongoing dialogue between Western and Russian theorists.
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Corporeal Words
Mikhail Bakhtins Theology Discourse
Alexandar Mihailovic
Northwestern University Press, 1997
This text explores Mikhail Bakhtin's reliance on the terms and concepts of theology. It begins with an identification of the theological categories and terms recalling Christology in general and Trinitarianism in particular that emerge throughout Bakhtin's long and varied career. Alexander Mihailovic discusses the elaborately wrought subtextual imagery, wordplay, and palpable orality of Bakhtin's theology of discourse, and explores the role that theology plays in supporting Bakhtin's ideas about the anti-hierarchical drift of language and culture.
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Dialogue at the Margins
Whorf, Bakhtin, and Linguistic Relativity
Emily A. Schultz
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

The “linguistic relativity principle” of pioneering American linguist Benjamin Whorf has been a focus of controversy among scholars of language for half a century. Many claim that this principle amounts to Whorf’s assertion that language determines thought and culture, while others vigorously reject such a claim. Emily Schultz rereads Whorf in terms of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, and argues that the Whorfian controversy is rooted in the polyphonic character of his best known texts. By combining Whorfian and Bakhtinian insights concerning variation within and across languages, Schultz offers a new dialogic interpretation of linguistic relativity that has profound implications for students and scholars of anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, philosophy of language, and literary and art criticism.

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A Dialogue of Voices
Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin
Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

A Dialogue of Voices was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his notions of dialogics and genre, has had a substantial impact on contemporary critical practices. Until now, however, little attention has been paid to the possibilities and challenges Bakhtin presents to feminist theory, the task taken up in A Dialogue of Voices. The original essays in this book combine feminism and Bakhtin in unique ways and, by interpreting texts through these two lenses, arrive at new theoretical approaches. Together, these essays point to a new direction for feminist theory that originates in Bakhtin-one that would lead to a feminine être rather than a feminine écriture.

Focusing on feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Teresa de Lauretis, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig in conjunction with Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and chronotope, the authors offer close readings of texts from a wide range of multicultural genres, including nature writing, sermon composition, nineteenth-century British women's fiction, the contemporary romance novel, Irish and French lyric poetry, and Latin American film. The result is a unique dialogue in which authors of both sexes, from several countries and different eras, speak against, for, and with one another in ways that reveal their works anew as well as the critical matrices surrounding them.

Karen Hohne is an independent scholar and artist living in Moorhead, Minnesota. Helen Wussow is an assistant professor of English at Memphis State University.

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Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs
Lynn Ellen Patyk
Northwestern University Press, 2023

Confronting Bakhtin’s formative reading of Dostoevsky to recover the ways the novelist stokes conflict and engages readers—and to explore the reasons behind his adversarial approach
 
Like so many other elements of his work, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s deliberate deployment of provocation was both prescient and precocious. In this book, Lynn Ellen Patyk singles out these forms of incitement as a communicative strategy that drives his paradoxical art. Challenging, revising, and expanding on Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational analysis in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Patyk demonstrates that provocation is the moving mover of Dostoevsky’s poetics of conflict, and she identifies the literary devices he uses to propel plot conflict and capture our attention. Yet the full scope of Dostoevsky’s provocative authorial activity can only be grasped alongside an understanding of his key themes, which both probed and exploited the most divisive conflicts of his era. The ultimate stakes of such friction are, for him, nothing less than moral responsibility and the truth of identity.
 
Sober and strikingly original, compassionate but not uncritical, Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs exposes the charged current in the wiring of our modern selves. In an economy of attention and its spoils, provocation is an inexhaustibly renewable and often toxic resource.

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The Gift of Active Empathy
Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky
Alina Wyman
Northwestern University Press, 2016
This innovative study brings the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin into conversation with Max Scheler and Fyodor Dostoevsky to explore the question of what makes emotional co-experiencing ethically and spiritually productive. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin's well-known concept of the dialogical partner expresses what he sees as the potential of human relationships in Dostoevsky's work. But his earlier reflections on the ethical and aesthetic uses of empathy, in part inspired by Scheler's philosophy, suggest a still more fundamental form of communication that operates as a basis for human togetherness in Dostoevsky. Applying this rich and previously neglected theoretical apparatus in a literary analysis, Wyman examines the obstacles to active empathy in Dostoevsky's fictional world, considers the limitations and excesses of empathy, addresses the problem of frustrated love in The Idiot and Notes from Underground, and provides a fresh interpretation of two of Dostoevsky's most iconic characters, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov.
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Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition
Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics
M. Keith Booker
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Literary studies of James Joyce, perhaps more so than those of any other author, have been enriched by important developments in literary theory in the last twenty-five years. Noting a curious gap in this scholarship, M. Keith Booker brings the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, unquestionably one of the most important literary theorists of this century, to bear on Joyce's relationship to six of his literary predecessors. In clear and readable prose, Booker explores Joyce's dialogues not only with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, his three most obvious predecessors, but with Rabelais, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, three literary figures important in Bakhtin's theoretical work.
These six writers provide the opportunity to examine Joyce's work with regard to several of Bakhtin's most important concepts. If Homer represents the authority of epic, Rabelais represents for Bakhtin the subversive multivocal energies of carnivalesque genres. As opposed to his description of Dante's attempts to escape from historicity, Bakhtin figures Goethe as the epitome of engagement with the temporality of everyday history. And Bakhtin's generic denial of polyphony in the works of Shakespeare contrasts with Bakhtin's identification of Dostoevsky as the most polyphonic writer in all the world of literature.
Together, Booker's comparative readings suggest a Joyce whose works are politically committed, historically engaged, and socially relevant. In short, they suggest a Joyce whose work differs radically from conventional notions of modernist literature as culturally elitist, historically detached, and more interested in individual psychology than in social reality.
M. Keith Booker is Professor of English, University of Arkansas.
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Mikhail Bakhtin
Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist
Harvard University Press, 1984

In such diverse fields as semiotics, literary theory, social theory, linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, Mikhail Bakhtin’s importance is increasingly recognized. His posthumous fame comes in striking contrast to his obscurity during his lifetime (1895–1975), much of it spent as a semi-invalid in a succession of provincial towns. He received no public recognition, in the Soviet Union or abroad, until the last dozen years of his long life—not surprisingly, given the historical circumstances. His books on Freudianism (1927), on Formalism (1928), and on Marxism and the philosophy of language (1929) were published as the work of others, as were a number of important essays. His study of Dostoevsky appeared under his own name but only after his arrest and sentence to exile, and it quickly disappeared from sight. Some manuscripts were never published; one was used by Bakhtin for cigarette paper. His book on Rabelais, completed in 1940, remained unpublished for twenty-five years—until, in a less repressive political climate, friends had succeeded in negotiating a reissue of the book on Dostoevsky.

The Rabelais book, when translated, caused a stir among folklorists, anthropologists, and social historians, with its theory of carnival and of ritual inversions of hierarchy. The book on Dostoevsky aroused intense interest among literary theorists in the concept of the “polyphonic novel” and the many authorial voices to be heard therein. Similarly, as Bakhtin’s other writings have appeared in translation, he has been hailed in disparate circles for his contributions to linguistic, psychoanalytic, and social theory. But among all those who have studied various aspects of Bakhtin’s work, few have been in a position, or even attempted, to assess his total achievement.

It is the great merit of Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist’s book that they have endeavored, insofar as possible, to give us the complete life and the complete works of this complex and multifaceted figure. The authors have had unique access to the Bakhtin archive in Moscow, have traced further material in other cities in Europe, and have interviewed many persons who knew Bakhtin. The phases of his life are placed in their physical and intellectual milieux, and accounts are given of the figures who made up the various “Bakhtin circles” over the years. All of the works, published and unpublished, are discussed, in the context of European philosophical movements and the currents of thought of the time. Underlying and informing Bakhtin’s particular theories in various fields was, in the authors’ view, his lifelong meditation on the relation between self and other. The philosophy he evolved has come to be called dialogism, since it conceives of the world in terms of communication and exchange. It is a world view with wide-ranging implications for the human sciences.

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Mikhail Bakhtin
The Duvakin Interviews, 1973
Slav N Gratchev
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. Unlike many of his Symbolist generation, Bakhtin was not fascinated by his own self-image. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin’s personal views:  on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Bakhtin's passion for poetic language and his insights into music also come as a surprise to readers of his essays on the novel. One remarkable thread running through the conversations is Bakhtin's love of poetry, masses of which he knew by heart in several languages. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, translated and annotated here from the complete transcript of the tapes, offers a fuller, more flexible image of Bakhtin than we could have imagined beneath his now famous texts.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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A Pedagogy of Possibility
Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies
Kay Halasek
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

In a book that itself exemplifies the dialogic scholarship it proposes, Kay Halasek reconceives composition studies from a Bakhtinian perspective, focusing on both the discipline's theoretical assumptions and its pedagogies.

Framing her discussions at every level of the discipline—theoretical, historical, pedagogical—Halasek provides an overview of portions of the Bakhtinian canon relevant to composition studies, explores the implications of Mikhail Bakhtin's work in the teaching of writing and for current debates about the role of theory in composition studies, and provides a model of scholarship that strives to maintain dialogic balance between practice and theory, between composition studies and Bakhtinian thought.

Halasek's study ranges broadly across the field of composition, painting in wide strokes a new picture of the discipline, focusing on the finer details of the rhetorical situation, and teasing out the implications of Bakhtinian thought for classroom practice by examining the nature of critical reading and writing, the efficacy and ethics of academic discourse, student resistance, and critical and conflict pedagogy. The book ends by setting out a pedagogy of possibility, what Halasek terms elsewhere a "post-critical pedagogy" that redefines and redirects current discussions of home versus academic literacies and discourses.

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Rethinking Bakhtin
Extensions and Challenges
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson
Northwestern University Press, 1989
The essays in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges extend Bakhtin's concepts in important new directions and challenge Bakhtin's own use of his most cherished ideas. Four sets of paired essays explore the theory of parody, the relation of de Man's poetics to Bakhtin's dialogics, Bakhtin's approach to Tolstoy and ideological literature generally, and the dangers of dialogue, not only in practice but also as an ideal.
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Saying And Silence
Frank Farmer
Utah State University Press, 2001
In composition studies for the last two or three decades, Bakhtin has been especially influential through his theories of language, dialogue, and genre. His work is required reading in upper division and graduate rhetoric courses and is included in the recent major surveys if rhetoric.

Frank Farmer has contributed important essays to the study of Bakhtin in composition, and in Saying and Silence he gathers some of those, along with several new essays, into a single volume. Scholars who specialize in Bakhtin will find this work engaging, but equally Farmer wants to explicate and apply Bakhtin for readers whose focus is teaching or some other nonspecialist dimension of writing scholarship.

Farmer explores the relationship between the meaningful word and the meaningful pause, between saying and silence, especially as the relationship emerges in our classrooms, our disciplinary conversations, and encounters with publics beyond the academy. Each of his chapters here addresses some aspect of how we and our students, colleagues, and critics have our say and speak our piece, often under conditions where silence is the institutionally sanctioned and preferred alternative. He has enlisted a number of Bakhtinian ideas (the superaddressee, outsideness, voice in dialogue) to help in the project of interpreting the silences we hear, naming the silences we do not hear, and of encouraging all silences to speak in ways that are freely chosen, not enforced.

What he offers, then, is a compact collection that addresses major areas of Bakhtinian thought and influence on composition practice to date. And he does this in a voice and style that will be accessible to the general scholar as well as the specialist and will be suitable for use with the advanced composition student, too.

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Testimony after Catastrophe
Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence
Stevan Weine
Northwestern University Press, 2006
Survivors of political violence give testimonies in families and communities, trials and truth commissions, religious institutions, psychotherapies, newspapers, documentaries, artworks, and even in solitude. Through spoken, written, and visual images, survivors' testimonies tell stories that may change history, politics, and life itself. In this book Stevan Weine, a psychiatrist and scholar in the field of mental health and human rights, focuses on the testimony of survivors for the hope it might hold-hope expressed by survivors again and again that, no matter what horrors or humiliations they have endured, some good might come of their stories. It is through the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin, and his approach to narrative, that Weine seeks to read the testimony of survivors of political violence from four different twentieth-century historical nightmares--and to read them as the stories they are meant to be, fully conveying their legitimacy, resourcefulness, power--and, finally, hope.

A deeply involving, compassionate, occasionally confrontational blend of practical hands-on experience and dialogic theory, emerging from the author's decade-long work in Europe and Chicago with survivors of the Balkan wars, this book is committed to the proposition that efforts to use testimony to address the consequences of political violence can be strengthened--though by no means guaranteed--if they are based on a fuller acknowledgment of the personal and ethical elements embodied in the narrative essence of testimony. These elements are what Testimony after Catastrophe seeks to reveal.
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