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Art and Answerability
Early Philosophical Essays
By M. M. Bakhtin
University of Texas Press, 1990

Art and Answerability contains three of Mikhail Bakhtin's early essays from the years following the Russian Revolution, when Bakhtin and other intellectuals eagerly participated in the debates, lectures, demonstrations, and manifesto writing of the period. Because they predate works that have already been translated, these essays—"Art and Answerability," "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," and "The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art"—are essential to a comprehensive understanding of Bakhtin's later works. A superb introduction by Michael Holquist sets out the major themes and concerns of the three essays and identifies their place in the canon of Bakhtin's work and in intellectual history. The introduction, together with Vadim Liapunov's scholarly gloss, makes these essays accessible to students as well as scholars.

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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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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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The Dialogic Imagination
Four Essays
By M. M. Bakhtin
University of Texas Press, 1982

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.

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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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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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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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Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
By M.M. Bakhtin
University of Texas Press, 1986

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays presents six short works from Bakhtin's Esthetics of Creative Discourse, published in Moscow in 1979. This is the last of Bakhtin's extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman) were written in Bakhtin's later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.

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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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Toward a Philosophy of the Act
By M. M. Bakhtin
University of Texas Press, 1993

Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse—all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism.

A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. mci will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics.

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