Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (November 17, 1895,
OryolOryol or Orel is a city and the administrative center of Oryol Oblast, Russia, located on the Oka River, approximately south-southwest of Moscow...
– March 7, 1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on
literary theoryLiterary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
, ethics, and the
philosophy of languagePhilosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions (
MarxismMarxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
,
semioticsSemiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
,
structuralismStructuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, religious criticism) and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the
Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s.
Introduction
Bakhtin had a difficult life and career, and few of his works were published in an authoritative form during his lifetime. As a result, there is substantial disagreement over matters that are normally taken for granted: what discipline he worked in (was he a philosopher or literary critic?), how to periodize his work, and even what texts he wrote (see below). He is known for a series of concepts that have been used and adapted in a number of disciplines:
dialogismThe English terms dialogic and dialogism often refer to the concept used by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin in his work of literary theory, The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin contrasts the dialogic and the "monologic" work of literature. The dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue...
, the
carnivalesqueCarnivalesque is an traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival, itself related to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival originally of the sub-deacons of the cathedral, held about the time of the Feast of the Circumcision , in which the humbler cathedral officials...
, the
chronotopeIn the philosophy of language and philology, chronotope is a term coined by M.M. Bakhtin to describe the way time and space are described by language, and, in particular, how literature represents them...
,
heteroglossiaThe term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single "linguistic code". In Greek hetero = different + glōssa = tongue, language...
and "outsidedness" (the English translation of a Russian term
vnenakhodimost, sometimes rendered into English—from French rather than from Russian—as "exotopy"). Together these concepts outline a distinctive philosophy of language and culture that has at its center the claims that all discourse is in essence a dialogical exchange and that this endows all language with a particular ethical or ethico-political force.
As a literary theorist, Bakhtin is associated with the Russian Formalists, and his work is compared with that of
Yuri LotmanYuri Mikhailovich Lotman – a prominent Soviet literary scholar, semiotician, and cultural historian. Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences...
; in 1963
Roman JakobsonRoman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
mentioned him as one of the few intelligent critics of Formalism. During the 1920s, Bakhtin's work tended to focus on ethics and aesthetics in general. Early pieces such as
Towards a Philosophy of the Act and
Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity are indebted to the philosophical trends of the time—particularly the Marburg School
Neo-KantianismNeo-Kantianism refers broadly to a revived type of philosophy along the lines of that laid down by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, or more specifically by Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian philosophy in his work The World as Will and Representation , as well as by other post-Kantian...
of Hermann Cohen, including
Ernst CassirerErnst Cassirer was a German philosopher. He was one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the 20th century...
,
Max SchelerMax Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology...
and, to a lesser extent,
Nicolai Hartmann-Biography:Hartmann was born of German descent in Riga, which was then the capital of the Russian province of Livonia, and which is now in Latvia. He studied Medicine at the University of Tartu , then Philosophy in St. Petersburg and at the University of Marburg in Germany, where he took his Ph.D....
. Bakhtin began to be discovered by scholars in 1963, but it was only after his death in 1975 that authors such as
Julia KristevaJulia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
and
Tzvetan TodorovTzvetan Todorov is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher. He has lived in France since 1963 with his wife Nancy Huston and their two children, writing books and essays about literary theory, thought history and culture theory....
brought Bakhtin to the attention of the Francophone world, and from there his popularity in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, the
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, and many other countries continued to grow. In the late 1980s, Bakhtin's work experienced a surge of popularity in the West.
Bakhtin’s primary works include
Toward a Philosophy of the Act, an unfinished portion of a philosophical essay;
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art, to which Bakhtin later added a chapter on the concept of carnival and published with the title
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics;
Rabelais and His World, which explores the openness of the Rabelaisian novel;
The Dialogic Imagination, whereby the four essays that comprise the work introduce the concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and chronotope; and
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, a collection of essays in which Bakhtin concerns himself with method and culture.
In the 1920s there was a "Bakhtin school" in Russia, in line with the
discourseDiscourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
analysis of
Ferdinand de SaussureFerdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
and
Roman JakobsonRoman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
.
Early life
Bakhtin was born in
OryolOryol or Orel is a city and the administrative center of Oryol Oblast, Russia, located on the Oka River, approximately south-southwest of Moscow...
,
RussiaRussia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, to an old family of the nobility. His father was the manager of a bank and worked in several cities. For this reason Bakhtin spent his early childhood years in Orel,
VilniusVilnius is the capital of Lithuania, and its largest city, with a population of 560,190 as of 2010. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the capital of Vilnius County...
, and then
OdessaOdessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
, where in 1913 he joined the historical and philological faculty at the local university. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist write: "Odessa..., like Vilnius, was an appropriate setting for a chapter in the life of a man who was to become the philosopher of heteroglossia and carnival. The same sense of fun and irreverence that gave birth to Babel's Rabelaisian gangster or to the tricks and deceptions of
Ostap BenderOstap Bender is a fictional con man and antihero who first appeared in the novel The Twelve Chairs written by Soviet authors Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov and released in January 1928.-Appearances:...
, the picaro created by
Ilf and PetrovIlya Ilf Ilya Ilf Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg and Evgeny or Yevgeni Petrov (Yevgeniy Petrovich Kataev or Katayev were two Soviet prose authors of the 1920s and 1930s...
, left its mark on Bakhtin." He later transferred to Petersburg University to join his brother Nikolai. It is here that Bakhtin was greatly influenced by the classicist F. F. Zelinsky, whose works contain the beginnings of concepts elaborated by Bakhtin.
Career
Bakhtin completed his studies in 1918 and moved to a small city in western Russia,
NevelNevel is a town and the administrative center of Nevelsky District of Pskov Oblast, Russia, located on Lake Nevel southeast of Pskov. Population:...
(
Pskov OblastPskov Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . Pskov Oblast borders the countries of Estonia and Latvia, as well as Belarus. It is the westernmost federal subject of contiguous Russia . Its major cities are the administrative center Pskov and Velikiye Luki . Area: 55,300 km²...
), where he worked as a schoolteacher for two years. It was at this time that the first "Bakhtin Circle" formed. The group consisted of intellectuals with varying interests, but all shared a love for the discussion of literary, religious, and political topics. Included in this group were
Valentin VoloshinovValentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov was a Soviet/Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology....
and, eventually, P. N. Medvedev, who joined the group later in
VitebskVitebsk, also known as Viciebsk or Vitsyebsk , is a city in Belarus, near the border with Russia. The capital of the Vitebsk Oblast, in 2004 it had 342,381 inhabitants, making it the country's fourth largest city...
. German philosophy was the topic talked about most frequently and, from this point forward, Bakhtin considered himself more a philosopher than a literary scholar. It was in Nevel, also, that Bakhtin worked tirelessly on a large work concerning moral philosophy that was never published in its entirety. However, in 1919, a short section of this work was published and given the title "Art and Responsibility". This piece constitutes Bakhtin’s first published work. Bakhtin relocated to Vitebsk in 1920. It was here, in 1921, that Bakhtin married Elena Aleksandrovna Okolovich. Later, in 1923, Bakhtin was diagnosed with
osteomyelitisOsteomyelitis simply means an infection of the bone or bone marrow...
, a bone disease that ultimately led to the amputation of his leg in 1938. This illness hampered his productivity and rendered him an invalid.
In 1924, Bakhtin moved to
LeningradSaint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
, where he assumed a position at the Historical Institute and provided consulting services for the State Publishing House. It is at this time that Bakhtin decided to share his work with the public, but just before "On the Question of the Methodology of Aesthetics in Written Works" was to be published, the journal in which it was to appear stopped publication. This work was eventually published 51 years later. The repression and misplacement of his manuscripts was something that would plague Bakhtin throughout his career. In 1929, "Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art", Bakhtin’s first major work, was published. It is here that Bakhtin introduces the concept of dialogism. However, just as this revolutionary book was introduced, Bakhtin was accused of participating in the
Russian Orthodox ChurchThe Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...
's underground movement. The truthfulness of this charge is not known, even today. Consequently, during one of the many purges of artists and intellectuals that
Joseph StalinJoseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
conducted during the early years of his rule, Bakhtin was sentenced to exile in
SiberiaSiberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
but appealed on the grounds that, in his weakened state, it would kill him. Instead, he was sentenced to six years of internal exile in
KazakhstanKazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
.
Bakhtin spent these six years working as a book-keeper in the town of Kustanai, during which time he wrote several important essays, including "Discourse in the Novel". In 1936 he taught courses at the
Mordovian Pedagogical InstituteN. P. Ogarev's Mordovian State University is located in the city of Saransk, the capital of the Republic of Mordovia, Russia. It was established in October 1957 as an expansion of the Mordovian National Pedagogical Institute, established in 1931...
in
SaranskSaransk is a city in central European Russia and the capital of the Republic of Mordovia, as well as its financial and economic center. It is located in the Volga basin at the confluence of the Saranka and Insar Rivers, about east of Moscow...
. An obscure figure in a provincial college, he dropped out of view and taught only occasionally. In 1937, Bakhtin moved to
KimryKimry , formerly Kimra, is a town in the south of Tver Oblast, Russia, located on the Volga River, at its confluence with the Kimrka River, to the east of Tver...
, a town located a couple of hundred kilometers from Moscow. Here, Bakhtin completed work on a book concerning the 18th-century German novel which was subsequently accepted by the Sovetskii Pisatel' Publishing House. However, the only copy of the manuscript disappeared during the upheaval caused by the German invasion.
After the amputation of his leg in 1938, Bakhtin’s health improved and he became more prolific. In 1940, and until the end of
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Bakhtin lived in Moscow, where he submitted a dissertation on
François RabelaisFrançois Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
to the
Gorky Institute of World LiteratureThe Gorky Institute of World Literature is a research institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.It was founded on 17 September 1932 for the 40th anniversary of M. Gorky`s literary activity.Web-site: http://www.imli.ru/...
to obtain a postgraduate title, a dissertation that could not be defended until the war ended. In 1946 and 1949, the defense of this dissertation divided the scholars of Moscow into two groups: those official opponents guiding the defense, who accepted the original and unorthodox manuscript, and those other professors who were against the manuscript’s acceptance. The book's earthy, anarchic topic was the cause of many arguments that ceased only when the government intervened. Ultimately, Bakhtin was denied a doctorate and granted a lesser degree by the State Accrediting Bureau. Later, Bakhtin was invited back to Saransk, where he took on the position of chair of the General Literature Department at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute. When, in 1957, the Institute changed from a teachers' college to a university, Bakhtin became head of the Department of Russian and World Literature. In 1961, Bakhtin’s deteriorating health forced him to retire, and in 1969, in search of medical attention, Bakhtin moved back to Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1975.
Bakhtin’s works and ideas gained popularity after his death, and he endured difficult conditions for much of his professional life, a time in which information was often seen as dangerous and therefore often hidden. As a result, the details provided now are often of uncertain accuracy. Also contributing to the imprecision of these details is the limited access to Russian archival information during Bakhtin’s life. It is only after the archives became public that scholars realized that much of what they thought they knew about the details of Bakhtin’s life was false or skewed largely by Bakhtin himself.
Toward a Philosophy of the Act
Toward a Philosophy of the Act was first published in the USSR in 1986 with the title
K filosofii postupka. The manuscript, written between 1919–1921, was found in bad condition with pages missing and sections of text that were illegible. Consequently, this philosophical essay appears today as a fragment of an unfinished work.
Toward a Philosophy of the Act comprises only an introduction, of which the first few pages are missing, and part one of the full text. However, Bakhtin’s intentions for the work were not altogether lost, for he provided an outline in the introduction in which he stated that the essay was to contain four parts. The first part of the essay deals with the analysis of the performed acts or deeds that comprise the actual world; "the world actually experienced, and not the merely thinkable world." For the three subsequent and unfinished parts of
Toward a Philosophy of the Act Bakhtin states the topics he intends to discuss. He outlines that the second part will deal with aesthetic activity and the ethics of artistic creation; the third with the ethics of politics; and the fourth with religion.
Toward a Philosophy of the Act reveals a young Bakhtin who is in the process of developing his moral philosophy by decentralizing the work of
KantKANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
. This text is one of Bakhtin’s early works concerning
ethicsEthics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
and
aestheticsAesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
and it is here that Bakhtin lays out three claims regarding the acknowledgment of the uniqueness of one’s participation in Being:
- I both actively and passively participate in Being.
- My uniqueness is given but it simultaneously exists only to the degree to which I actualize this uniqueness (in other words, it is in the performed act and deed that has yet to be achieved).
- Because I am actual and irreplaceable I must actualize my uniqueness.
Bakhtin further states: "It is in relation to the whole actual unity that my unique thought arises from my unique place in Being." Bakhtin deals with the concept of morality whereby he attributes the predominating legalistic notion of morality to human moral action. According to Bakhtin, the I cannot maintain neutrality toward moral and ethical demands which manifest themselves as one’s voice of consciousness.
It is here also that Bakhtin introduces an "architectonic" or
schemaThe word schema comes from the Greek word "σχήμα" , which means shape, or more generally, plan. The plural is "σχήματα"...
tic model of the human psyche which consists of three components: "I-for-myself", "I-for-the-other", and "other-for-me". The I-for-myself is an unreliable source of identity, and Bakhtin argues that it is the I-for-the-other through which human beings develop a sense of identity because it serves as an amalgamation of the way in which others view me. Conversely, other-for-me describes the way in which others incorporate my perceptions of them into their own identities. Identity, as Bakhtin describes it here, does not belong merely to the individual, rather it is shared by all.
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics: polyphony and unfinalizability
During his time in Leningrad, Bakhtin shifted his focus away from the philosophy characteristic of his early works and towards the notion of dialogue. It is at this time that he began his engagement with the work of
Fyodor DostoevskyFyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
.
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art is considered to be Bakhtin’s seminal work, and it is here that Bakhtin introduces three important concepts.
First, is the concept of the unfinalizable self: individual people cannot be finalized, completely understood, known, or labeled. Though it is possible to understand people and to treat them as if they are completely known, Bakhtin’s conception of
unfinalizability respects the possibility that a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. Readers may find that this conception reflects the idea of the "soul"; Bakhtin had strong roots in
ChristianityChristianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
and in the Neo-Kantian school led by
Hermann CohenHermann Cohen was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, and he is often held to be "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century".-Life:...
, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual's potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul.
Second, is the idea of the relationship between the self and others, or other groups. According to Bakhtin, every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. In an interview, Bakhtin once explained that,
In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others.
~New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993.
As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on the self, not merely in terms of how a person comes to be, but also in how a person thinks and how a person sees him- or herself truthfully.
Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky's work a true representation of "
polyphonyIn literature, polyphony is a feature of narrative, which includes a diversity of points of view and voices. The concept was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, based on the musical concept polyphony....
", that is, many voices. Each character in Dostoevsky's work represents a voice that speaks for an individual self, distinct from others. This idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unfinalizability and self-and-others, since it is the unfinalizability of individuals that creates true polyphony.
Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic concept of truth. He criticized the assumption that, if two people disagree, at least one of them must be in error. He challenged philosophers for whom plurality of minds is accidental and superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a sentence or a phrase. Instead, truth is a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically inconsistent, statements. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a single mind, it also cannot be expressed by "a single mouth". The polyphonic truth requires many simultaneous voices. Bakhtin does not mean to say that many voices carry partial truths that complement each other. A number of different voices do not make the truth if simply "averaged" or "synthesized". It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from untruth.
When, in subsequent years,
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art was translated into English and published in the West, Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept of "carnival" and the book was published with the slightly different title,
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. According to Bakhtin,
carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish and interact together. The carnival creates the "threshold" situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed and genuine dialogue becomes possible. The notion of a carnival was Bakhtin's way of describing Dostoevsky's polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is to say, the voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.
Rabelais and His World: carnival and grotesque
During World War II Bakhtin submitted a dissertation on the French Renaissance writer
François RabelaisFrançois Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
which was not defended until some years later. The controversial ideas discussed within the work caused much disagreement, and it was consequently decided that Bakhtin be denied his doctorate. Thus, due to its content,
Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was not published until 1965, at which time it was given the title,
Rabelais and His World.
A classic of Renaissance studies, in
Rabelais and His World Bakhtin explores Rabelais’
Gargantua and PantagruelThe Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father and his son and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, satirical vein...
. Bakhtin declares that, for centuries, Rabelais’s book had been misunderstood, and claimed that
Rabelais and His World clarified Rabelais’s intentions. In
Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin concerns himself with the openness of
Gargantua and Pantagruel; however, the book itself also serves as an example of such openness. Throughout the text, Bakhtin attempts two things: he seeks to recover sections of
Gargantua and Pantagruel that, in the past, were either ignored or suppressed, and conducts an analysis of the
RenaissanceThe Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language that was not. It is by means of this analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is
carnival (
carnivalesqueCarnivalesque is an traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival, itself related to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival originally of the sub-deacons of the cathedral, held about the time of the Feast of the Circumcision , in which the humbler cathedral officials...
) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is
grotesque realismThe grotesque body is a concept, or literary trope, put forward by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of François Rabelais' work. The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, the lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, noble, and ideal to the material level...
which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in
Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body and the material bodily lower stratum.
In his chapter on the history of laughter, Bakhtin advances the notion of its therapeutic and liberating force, arguing that in resisting hypocrisy "laughing truth... degraded power".
The Dialogic Imagination: Chronotope, Heteroglossia
The Dialogic Imagination (first published as a whole in 1975) is a compilation of four essays concerning language and the novel: "
Epic and NovelEpic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel [Эпос и роман ] is a 1941 essay that compares the novel to the epic; it was written by Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the major literary theorists of the twentieth century.The essay was originally given as a paper in the Moscow Institute of...
" (1941), "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse", "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel", and "Discourse in the Novel". It is through the essays contained within
The Dialogic Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the concepts of
heteroglossiaThe term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single "linguistic code". In Greek hetero = different + glōssa = tongue, language...
,
dialogism and
chronotopeIn the philosophy of language and philology, chronotope is a term coined by M.M. Bakhtin to describe the way time and space are described by language, and, in particular, how literature represents them...
, making a significant contribution to the realm of literary scholarship. Bakhtin explains the generation of meaning through the "primacy of context over text" (heteroglossia), the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia) and the relation between
utteranceIn spoken language analysis an utterance is a complete unit of speech. It is generally but not always bounded by silence.It can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways. Note that in such areas of research utterances do not exist in written language, only their representations...
s (
intertextualityIntertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
). Heteroglossia is "the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any
utteranceIn spoken language analysis an utterance is a complete unit of speech. It is generally but not always bounded by silence.It can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways. Note that in such areas of research utterances do not exist in written language, only their representations...
." To make an utterance means to "appropriate the words of others and populate them with one's own intention." Bakhtin's deep insights on dialogicality represent a substantive shift from views on the nature of language and knowledge by major thinkers as
Ferdinand de SaussureFerdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
and
Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
.
In "Epic and Novel", Bakhtin demonstrates the novel’s distinct nature by contrasting it with the
epicAn epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
. By doing so, Bakhtin shows that the novel is well-suited to the post-industrial civilization in which we live because it flourishes on diversity. It is this same diversity that the epic attempts to eliminate from the world. According to Bakhtin, the novel as a genre is unique in that it is able to embrace, ingest, and devour other genres while still maintaining its status as a novel. Other genres, however, cannot emulate the novel without damaging their own distinct identity.
"From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" is a less traditional essay in which Bakhtin reveals how various different texts from the past have ultimately come together to form the modern novel.
"Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" introduces Bakhtin’s concept of
chronotopeIn the philosophy of language and philology, chronotope is a term coined by M.M. Bakhtin to describe the way time and space are described by language, and, in particular, how literature represents them...
. This essay applies the concept in order to further demonstrate the distinctive quality of the novel. The word
chronotope literally means "time space" and is defined by Bakhtin as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature." For the purpose of his writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is forced to make use of the organizing categories of the real world in which he lives. For this reason
chronotope is a concept that engages reality.
The final essay, "Discourse in the Novel", is one of Bakhtin’s most complete statements concerning his philosophy of language. It is here that Bakhtin provides a model for a history of discourse and introduces the concept of
heteroglossiaThe term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single "linguistic code". In Greek hetero = different + glōssa = tongue, language...
. The term
heteroglossia refers to the qualities of a language that are extralinguistic, but common to all languages. These include qualities such as perspective, evaluation, and ideological positioning. In this way most languages are incapable of neutrality, for every word is inextricably bound to the context in which it exists.
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
In
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays Bakhtin moves away from the novel and concerns himself with the problems of method and the nature of culture. There are six essays that comprise this compilation: "Response to a Question from the
Novy Mir Editorial Staff", "The
Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism", "The Problem of Speech Genres", "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis", "From Notes Made in 1970-71," and "Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences."
"Response to a Question from the
Novy Mir Editorial Staff" is a transcript of comments made by Bakhtin to a reporter from a monthly journal called
Novy Mir that was widely read by Soviet intellectuals. The transcript expresses Bakhtin’s opinion of literary scholarship whereby he highlights some of its shortcomings and makes suggestions for improvement.
"The
BildungsromanIn literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
and Its Significance in the History of
RealismLiterary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
" is a fragment from one of Bakhtin’s lost books. The publishing house to which Bakhtin had submitted the full manuscript was blown up during the German invasion and Bakhtin was in possession of only the prospectus. However, due to a shortage of paper, Bakhtin began using this remaining section to roll cigarettes. So only a portion of the opening section remains. This remaining section deals primarily with Goethe.
"The Problem of Speech
GenreGenre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
s" deals with the difference between Saussurean
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and language as a living dialogue (translinguistics). In a relatively short space, this essay takes up a topic about which Bakhtin had planned to write a book, making the essay a rather dense and complex read. It is here that Bakhtin distinguishes between literary and everyday language. According to Bakhtin, genres exist not merely in language, but rather in communication. In dealing with genres, Bakhtin indicates that they have been studied only within the realm of
rhetoricRhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
and
literatureLiterature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, but each discipline draws largely on genres that exist outside both rhetoric and literature. These extraliterary genres have remained largely unexplored. Bakhtin makes the distinction between primary genres and secondary genres, whereby primary genres legislate those words, phrases, and expressions that are acceptable in everyday life, and secondary genres are characterized by various types of text such as legal, scientific, etc.
"The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis" is a compilation of the thoughts Bakhtin recorded in his notebooks. These notes focus mostly on the problems of the text, but various other sections of the paper discuss topics he has taken up elsewhere, such as speech genres, the status of the author, and the distinct nature of the human sciences. However, "The Problem of the Text" deals primarily with dialogue and the way in which a text relates to its context. Speakers, Bakhtin claims, shape an utterance according to three variables: the object of discourse, the immediate addressee, and a
superaddressee. This is what Bakhtin describes as the tertiary nature of dialogue.
"From Notes Made in 1970-71" appears also as a collection of fragments extracted from notebooks Bakhtin kept during the years of 1970 and 1971. It is here that Bakhtin discusses interpretation and its endless possibilities. According to Bakhtin, humans have a habit of making narrow interpretations, but such limited interpretations only serve to weaken the richness of the past.
The final essay, "Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences", originates from notes Bakhtin wrote during the mid-seventies and is the last piece of writing Bakhtin produced before he died. In this essay he makes a distinction between dialectic and dialogics and comments on the difference between the text and the aesthetic object. It is here also, that Bakhtin differentiates himself from the
FormalistsFormalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...
, who, he felt, underestimated the importance of content while oversimplifying change, and the
StructuralistsStructuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, who too rigidly adhered to the concept of "code."
Disputed texts
Some of the works which bear the names of Bakhtin's close friends V. N. Vološinov and P. N. Medvedev have been attributed to Bakhtin – particularly
The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and
Marxism and Philosophy of Language. These claims originated in the early 1970s and received their earliest full articulation in English in Clark and Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin. In the years since then, however, most scholars have come to agree that Vološinov and Medvedev ought to be considered the true authors of these works. Although Bakhtin undoubtedly influenced these scholars and may even have had a hand in composing the works attributed to them, it now seems clear that if it was necessary to attribute authorship of these works to one person, Vološinov and Medvedev respectively should receive credit.
Influence
He is known today for his interest in a wide variety of subjects, ideas, vocabularies, and periods, as well as his use of authorial disguises, and for his influence (alongside György Lukács) on the growth of Western scholarship on the novel as a premiere literary genre. As a result of the breadth of topics with which he dealt, Bakhtin has influenced such Western schools of theory as Neo-Marxism, Structuralism, and Semiotics. However, his influence on such groups has, somewhat paradoxically, resulted in narrowing the scope of Bakhtin’s work. According to Clark and Holquist, rarely do those who incorporate Bakhtin’s ideas into theories of their own appreciate his work in its entirety.
While Bakhtin is traditionally seen as a literary critic, there can be no denying his impact on the realm of rhetorical theory. Among his many theories and ideas Bakhtin indicates that style is a developmental process, occurring both within the user of language and language itself. His work instills in the reader an awareness of tone and expression that arises from the careful formation of verbal phrasing. By means of his writing, Bakhtin has enriched the experience of verbal and written expression which ultimately aids the formal teaching of writing. Some even suggest that Bakhtin introduces a new meaning to rhetoric because of his tendency to reject the separation of language and ideology.
See also
- Pavel Medvedev
Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev was a Russian literary scholar. He was a professor, social activist, and friend of Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as of Boris Pasternak and Fyodor Sologub. Medvedev held several government posts in education and publishing after the 1917 revolution, publishing a great deal of...
- Valentin Voloshinov
Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov was a Soviet/Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology....
- Russian Formalism
Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...
- Nikolai Marr
- Lev Vygotsky
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist, the founder of cultural-historical psychology, and the leader of the Vygotsky Circle.-Biography:...
- Voskresenie
The Voskresenie was a left-leaning, quasi-Masonic sect, which existed in Petrograd between 1918 and 1928. The group, which consisted of philosophers, professionals, and members of the Religious Philosophical Society, sought to support the Bolsheviks' economic policy but oppose their atheistic...
- Carnivalesque
Carnivalesque is an traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival, itself related to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival originally of the sub-deacons of the cathedral, held about the time of the Feast of the Circumcision , in which the humbler cathedral officials...
- heteroglossia
The term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single "linguistic code". In Greek hetero = different + glōssa = tongue, language...
- dialogism
- dialogical self
The dialogical self is a psychological concept which describes the mind's ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in close connection with external dialogue...
- Hubert Hermans
Hubert J.M. Hermans is a Dutch psychologist and Emeritus Professor at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, internationally known as the creator of Dialogical self theory.- Biography :...
- chronotope
In the philosophy of language and philology, chronotope is a term coined by M.M. Bakhtin to describe the way time and space are described by language, and, in particular, how literature represents them...
- Menippean satire
The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, which has a length and structure similar to a novel and is characterized by attacking mental attitudes instead of specific individuals...
Bakhtin works
- Bakhtin, M. M. [1930s] (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. [written during the 1930s]
- Bakhtin, M. M. [1941, 1965] Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
- Bakhtin, M.M. (1973) Questions of Literature and Aesthetics, (Russian) Progress Moscow, 1979
- Bakhtin, M. M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Bakhtin, M. M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.
- Bakhtin, M. M. (1990) Art and Answerability. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas Press [written 1919–1924, published 1974-1979]
- Bakhtin, M. M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press.
- M.M.Bakhtin, V.D.Duvakin, S.G.Bocharov, MM Bakhtin: besedy s VD Duvakinym (Russian), Soglasie, 2002
Works on Bakhtin
- Boer, Roland (еd), Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies. Atlanta/Leiden, Society of Biblical Literature/Brill, 2007.
- Bota, Cristian, and Jean-Paul Bronckart. Bakhtine démasqué: Histoire d'un menteur, d'une escroquerie et d'un délire collectif. Paris: Droz, 2011.
- Brandist, Craig. The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics London, Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002.
- Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
- Emerson, Caryl, and Gary Saul Morson
Gary Saul Morson is an American literary critic and Slavist, currently Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. He was Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania for many years prior to leaving for...
. “Mikhail Bakhtin.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth and Imre Szeman. Second Edition 2005. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 25 Jan. 2006 http://litguide.press.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/cgibin/view.cgi?eid=22&query=Bakhtin.
- Farmer, Frank. “Introduction.” Landmark Essays on Bakhtin, Rhetoric, and Writing. Ed. Frank Farmer. Mahwah: Hermagoras Press, 1998. xi-xxiii.
- Green, Barbara. Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Scholarship: An Introduction. SBL Semeia Studies 38. Atlanta: SBL, 2000.
- David Hayman Toward a Mechanics of Mode: Beyond Bakhtin NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Winter, 1983), pp. 101–120 doi:10.2307/1345079
- Jane H. Hill The Refiguration of the Anthropology of Language (review of Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics) Cultural Anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 89–102
- Hirschkop, Ken. “Bakhtin in the sober light of day.” Bakhtin and Cultural Theory. Eds. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001. 1-25.
- Hirschkop, Ken. Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Holquist, Michael. [1990] Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Second Edition. Routledge, 2002.
- Holquist, Michael. “Introduction.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. By Mikhail Bakhtin. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. ix-xxiii.
- Holquist, Michael. Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981. xv-xxxiv
- Holquist, M., & C. Emerson (1981). Glossary. In MM Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by MM Bakhtin.
- Klancher, Jon. “Bakhtin’s Rhetoric.” Landmark Essays on Bakhtin, Rhetoric, and Writing. Ed. Frank Farmer. Mahwah: Hermagoras Press, 1998. 23-32.
- Liapunov, Vadim. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. By Mikhail Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
- Maranhão, Tullio (1990) The Interpretation of Dialogue University of Chicago Press ISBN 0226504336
- Meletinsky, Eleazar Moiseevich, The Poetics of Myth (Translated by Guy Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky) 2000 Routledge ISBN 0415928982
- Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford University Press, 1990.
- Pechey, Graham. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World. London: Routledge, 2007. ISBN 9780415424196
- Schuster, Charles I. “Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist.” Landmark Essays on Bakhtin, Rhetoric, and Writing. Ed. Frank Farmer. Mahwah: Hermagoras Press, 1998. 1-14.
- Thorn, Judith. "The Lived Horizon of My Being: The Substantiation of the Self & the Discourse of Resistance in Rigoberta Menchu, Mm Bakhtin and Victor Montejo." University of Arizona Press. 1996.
- Townsend, Alex, Autonomous Voices: An Exploration of Polyphony in the Novels of Samuel Richardson, 2003, Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., New York, Wien, 2003, ISBN 978-3-906769-80-6 / US-ISBN 978-0-8204-5917-2
- Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester University Press, 1997
- Voloshinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York & London: Seminar Press. 1973
- Young, Robert J.C., 'Back to Bakhtin', in Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York, St Martin’s Press, 1996 ISBN 0719047773
- Mayerfeld Bell, Michael and Gardiner, Michael. Bakhtin and the Human Sciences. No last words. London-Thousand Oaks-New Delhi: SAGE Publications. 1998.
- Michael Gardiner Mikhail Bakhtin. SAGE Publications 2002 ISBN 9780761974475.
- Maria Shevtsova, Dialogism in the Novel and Bakhtin's Theory of Culture New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 3, History, Politics, and Culture (Summer, 1992), pp. 747–763 doi:10.2307/469228
- Stacy Burton Bakhtin, Temporality, and Modern Narrative: Writing "the Whole Triumphant Murderous Unstoppable Chute" Comparative Literature, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), pp. 39–64 doi:10.2307/1771629
- Vladislav Krasnov Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
and DostoevskyFyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
A study in the Polyphonic Novel by Vladislav Krasnov University of Georgia Press ISBN 0-8203-0472-7
- Maja Soboleva: Die Philosophie Michail Bachtins. Von der existentiellen Ontologie zur dialogischen Vernunft. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 2009. Jean-Paul Bronckart, Cristian Bota: Bakhtine démasqué : Histoire d'un menteur, d'une escroquerie et d'un délire collectif, Editeur : Droz, ISBN 2600005455
External links