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118-405: Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin ( / b ʌ x ˈ t iː n / bukh- TEEN ; Russian: Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н , IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈil mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪdʑ bɐxˈtʲin] ; 16 November [ O.S. 4 November] 1895 – 7 March 1975) was a Russian philosopher , literary critic and scholar who worked on literary theory , ethics, and the philosophy of language . His writings, on

236-525: A singular way". Between the speaking subject, the word, and its object there exists "an elastic environment of other words about the same object... it is precisely in the process of living interaction with this specific environment that the word may be individualized and given stylistic shape." There is, effectively, no such thing as the monad. People are not closed units, they are open, loose, disordered, unfinalized: they are "extraterritorial" and "nonself-sufficient". "To be means to be for another, and through

354-590: 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 Bildungsroman and Its Significance in

472-619: 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-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen, including Ernst Cassirer , Max Scheler and, to a lesser extent, Nicolai Hartmann . Bakhtin began to be discovered by scholars in 1963, but it was only after his death in 1975 that authors such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov brought Bakhtin to

590-452: A Philosophy of the Act was first published in the USSR in 1986 with the title K filosofii postupka . The manuscript, written between 1919 and 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

708-515: A basic principle of Dostoevsky's art: love and hate, faith and atheism, loftiness and degradation, love of life and self-destruction, purity and vice, etc. "everything in his world lives on the very border of its opposite." Carnivalization and its generic counterpart— Menippean satire —were not a part of the earlier book, but Bakhtin discusses them at great length in the chapter "Characteristics of Genre and Plot Composition in Dostoesky's Works" in

826-515: 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

944-569: A character's internal dialogue, is an other consciousness that never becomes merely an object for the author or any other character or voice. "A character's word about himself and his world is just as fully weighted as the author's... It possesses extraordinary independence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were, alongside the author's word and combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of other characters." In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics Bakhtin credits Dostoevsky with three major innovations that make possible

1062-479: A classic of Renaissance studies, 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 Renaissance social system in order to discover

1180-488: A degrading reification of a person's soul, a discounting of its freedom and its unfinalizability... Dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable, and unpredeterminable , turning point for their soul." ' Carnivalization ' is a term used by Bakhtin to describe the techniques Dostoevsky uses to disarm this increasingly ubiquitous enemy and make true intersubjective dialogue possible. The "carnival sense of

1298-817: 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 Formalists , who, he felt, underestimated the importance of content while oversimplifying change, and the Structuralists , who too rigidly adhered to the concept of "code." Some of the works which bear the names of Bakhtin's close friends V. N. Voloshinov and P. N. Medvedev have been attributed to Bakhtin – particularly Marxism and Philosophy of Language and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship . These claims originated in

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1416-617: A fascination with the body, particularly its little-glorified or 'lower strata' parts, and dichotomies between 'high' or 'low'." The high and low binary is particularly relevant in communication as certain verbiage is considered high, while slang is considered low. Moreover, much of popular communication including television shows, books, and movies fall into high and low brow categories. This is particularly prevalent in Bakhtin's native Russia, where postmodernist writers such as Boris Akunin have worked to change low brow communication forms (such as

1534-495: A form of monologization Bakhtin wrote: "Take a dialogue and remove the voices, remove the emotional and individualising intonations, carve out abstract concepts and judgements from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness—and that's how you get dialectics." Both relativism and dogmatism "exclude all argumentation, all authentic dialogue, by making it either unnecessary (relativism) or impossible (dogmatism)." Dogmatism excludes any view or evidence that

1652-501: A language, they do not reside within the system of language and are impossible among the elements of a language. Instead they must be analyzed as discourse . The discursive word is never separate from a subject who utters it in address to another subject: the word must be embodied for it to have any dialogical status. In his analysis Bakhtin distinguishes between single-voiced and double-voiced discourse. Single-voiced discourse always retains "ultimate semantic authority" for itself: it

1770-516: A letter dated "12/22 Dec. 1635". In his biography of John Dee , The Queen's Conjurer , Benjamin Woolley surmises that because Dee fought unsuccessfully for England to embrace the 1583/84 date set for the change, "England remained outside the Gregorian system for a further 170 years, communications during that period customarily carrying two dates". In contrast, Thomas Jefferson , who lived while

1888-422: A live event, a fruitful contact between human beings in a living, unfinalized context, becomes a sterile contact between abstracted things . When cultures and individuals accumulate habits and procedures (what Bakhtin calls the "sclerotic deposits" of earlier activity), and adopt forms based in "congealed" events from the past, the centripetal forces of culture will tend to codify them into a fixed set of rules. In

2006-581: A love for the discussion of literary, religious, and political topics. Included in this group were Valentin Voloshinov and, eventually, P. N. Medvedev , who joined the group later in Vitebsk . Vitebsk was "a cultural centre of the region" the perfect place for Bakhtin "and other intellectuals [to organize] lectures, debates and concerts." German philosophy was the topic talked about most frequently and, from this point forward, Bakhtin considered himself more

2124-414: A model of "monads acting according to rules", the living impulse that actually gives rise to discourse is ignored. According to Bakhtin, " to study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context of that real life toward which it was directed and by which it is determined. " In the existing forms of 'knowledge',

2242-589: 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 chronotope . This essay applies

2360-528: 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

2478-492: A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices ..." Later he defines it as "the event of interaction between autonomous and internally unfinalized consciousnesses." During World War II Bakhtin submitted a dissertation on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais which was not defended until some years later. The controversial ideas discussed within

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2596-413: A pre-existing set of rules to which they conform or structure that they exhibit. This forgets that the rules or structures have been abstracted from the event, that the event is prior to the abstraction and that the event is always replete with a context, intimacy, immediacy, and significance to the participants that is effaced in the act of abstraction: "We cannot understand the world of events from within

2714-552: A result of the breadth of topics with which he dealt, Bakhtin has influenced such Western schools of theory as Neo-Marxism , Structuralism , Social constructionism , and Semiotics . Bakhtin's works have also been useful in anthropology, especially theories of ritual. 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

2832-479: A sense of identity. The I-for-the-other serves as an amalgamation of the way in which others view the subject. Conversely, other-for-me describes the way in which others incorporate the subject's perceptions of them into their own identities. Identity, as Bakhtin describes it here, does not belong merely to the individual. Instead, it is shared by all. During his time in Leningrad, Bakhtin shifted his view away from

2950-439: A sharp satirical focus on contemporary ideas and issues. Bakhtin credits Dostoevsky with revitalizing the genre and enhancing it with his own innovation in form and structure: the polyphonic novel. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was the creator of the polyphonic novel , and it was a fundamentally new genre that could not be analysed according to preconceived frameworks and schema that might be useful for other manifestations of

3068-911: A start-of-year adjustment works well with little confusion for events before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar. For example, the Battle of Agincourt is well known to have been fought on 25 October 1415, which is Saint Crispin's Day . However, for the period between the first introduction of the Gregorian calendar on 15 October 1582 and its introduction in Britain on 14 September 1752, there can be considerable confusion between events in Continental Western Europe and in British domains. Events in Continental Western Europe are usually reported in English-language histories by using

3186-505: A variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions ( Marxism , semiotics , structuralism , religious criticism) and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he

3304-608: Is "the apotheosis of unfinalizability". Carnival, through its temporary dissolution or reversal of conventions, generates the 'threshold' situations where disparate individuals come together and express themselves on an equal footing, without the oppressive constraints of social objectification: the usual preordained hierarchy of persons and values becomes an occasion for laughter, its absence an opportunity for creative interaction. In carnival, "opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another." Bakhtin sees carnivalization in this sense as

3422-536: Is 9 February 1649, the date by which his contemporaries in some parts of continental Europe would have recorded his execution. The O.S./N.S. designation is particularly relevant for dates which fall between the start of the "historical year" (1 January) and the legal start date, where different. This was 25 March in England, Wales, Ireland and the colonies until 1752, and until 1600 in Scotland. In Britain, 1 January

3540-418: Is active, the other's word does not submit to the speaker's will, and the speaker's discourse becomes fraught with the resistance, challenge and implied hostility of the second voice. According to Bakhtin, hidden dialogue and hidden polemic are of great importance in all Dostoevsky's works, beginning with his earliest work, Poor Folk . The character of Makar Devushkin constructs his epistolary discourse around

3658-466: Is also key, especially when the two are related in terms of culture. Kim states that "culture as Geertz and Bakhtin allude to can be generally transmitted through communication or reciprocal interaction such as a dialogue." According to Leslie Baxter, "Bakhtin's life work can be understood as a critique of the monologization of the human experience that he perceived in the dominant linguistic, literary, philosophical, and political theories of his time." He

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3776-399: Is at variance with it, making dialogue impossible, while at the (theoretically) opposite extreme, relativism also has a monologising effect, because if everything is relative and all truths are equally arbitrary, there is simply an infinity of monologizations, not a fruitful dialogue. Relativism precludes the potential for creativity and new understanding inherent in dialogue: each finds only

3894-476: Is basic to the human experience." Culture and communication become inextricably linked, as one's understanding of a given utterance, text, or message, is contingent upon one's cultural background and experience. Kim argues that "his ideas of art as a vehicle oriented towards interaction with its audience in order to express or communicate any sort of intention is reminiscent of Clifford Geertz 's theories on culture." Sheckels contends that "what [... Bakhtin] terms

4012-506: Is here that Bakhtin was greatly influenced by the classicist F. F. Zelinsky , whose works contain the beginnings of concepts elaborated by Bakhtin. Bakhtin completed his studies in 1918. He then moved to a small city in western Russia, Nevel ( Pskov Oblast ), where he worked as a schoolteacher for two years. It was at that time that the first " Bakhtin Circle " formed. The group consisted of intellectuals with varying interests, but all shared

4130-612: Is inevitable and even necessary, it can never be the whole truth, devoid of the living response. Bakhtin is critical of what he calls the monologic tradition in Western thought that seeks to finalize humanity, and individual humans, in this way. He argues that Dostoevsky always wrote in opposition to ways of thinking that turn human beings into objects (scientific, economic, social, psychological etc.) – conceptual frameworks that enclose people in an alien web of definition and causation, robbing them of freedom and responsibility: "He saw in it

4248-480: Is known for a series of concepts that have been used and adapted in a number of disciplines: dialogism , the carnivalesque , the chronotope, heteroglossia 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

4366-416: Is not clouded by the presence of another word relative to its object. In double-voiced discourse, an other semantic intention, coincident with the speaker's own intention, is felt in the utterance . This second discourse (the "word of the other") can be either passive or active . When it is passive, the speaker is in control: the other's word is deliberately invoked for the speaker's own purposes. When it

4484-443: 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 within both 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

4602-609: The Russian Empire and the very beginning of Soviet Russia . For example, in the article "The October (November) Revolution", the Encyclopædia Britannica uses the format of "25 October (7 November, New Style)" to describe the date of the start of the revolution. The Latin equivalents, which are used in many languages, are, on the one hand, stili veteris (genitive) or stilo vetere (ablative), abbreviated st.v. , and meaning "(of/in) old style" ; and, on

4720-610: The 'Great Dialogue' of the polyphonic novel. The first is unfinalizability : Dostoevsky's image of the human being is of a being that can not be wholly finalized by anything, even death. The second is the representation, through words, of the " self-developing idea , inseparable from personality." The third is the discovery and creative elaboration of dialogue "as a special form of interaction among autonomous and equally signifying consciousnesses." Bakhtin argues that dialogic interactions are not reducible to forms that are analyzable by linguistic methods. While dialogic relations presuppose

4838-436: The 'carnivalesque' is tied to the body and the public exhibition of its more private functions [...] it served also as a communication event [...] anti-authority communication events [...] can also be deemed 'carnivalesque'." Essentially, the act of turning society around through communication, whether it be in the form of text, protest, or otherwise serves as a communicative form of carnival, according to Bakhtin. Steele furthers

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4956-467: The 1920s there was a "Bakhtin school" in Russia, in line with the discourse analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson . 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

5074-419: The 19th century, a practice that the author Karen Bellenir considered to reveal a deep emotional resistance to calendar reform. Dialogism Dialogue is usually analyzed as some kind of interaction between two monads on the basis of a pre-conceived model. Bakhtin regards this conception as a consequence of 'theoretism'—the tendency, particularly in modern western thought, to understand events according to

5192-539: The 4th century , had drifted from reality . The Gregorian calendar reform also dealt with the accumulated difference between these figures, between the years 325 and 1582, by skipping 10 days to set the ecclesiastical date of the equinox to be 21 March, the median date of its occurrence at the time of the First Council of Nicea in 325. Countries that adopted the Gregorian calendar after 1699 needed to skip an additional day for each subsequent new century that

5310-583: The Boyne was commemorated with smaller parades on 1 July. However, both events were combined in the late 18th century, and continue to be celebrated as " The Twelfth ". Because of the differences, British writers and their correspondents often employed two dates, a practice called dual dating , more or less automatically. Letters concerning diplomacy and international trade thus sometimes bore both Julian and Gregorian dates to prevent confusion. For example, Sir William Boswell wrote to Sir John Coke from The Hague

5428-515: The British Isles and colonies converted to the Gregorian calendar, instructed that his tombstone bear his date of birth by using the Julian calendar (notated O.S. for Old Style) and his date of death by using the Gregorian calendar. At Jefferson's birth, the difference was eleven days between the Julian and Gregorian calendars and so his birthday of 2 April in the Julian calendar is 13 April in

5546-410: The British colonies, changed the start of the year from 25 March to 1 January, with effect from "the day after 31 December 1751". (Scotland had already made this aspect of the changes, on 1 January 1600.) The second (in effect ) adopted the Gregorian calendar in place of the Julian calendar. Thus "New Style" can refer to the start-of-year adjustment , to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar , or to

5664-487: 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, he moved back to Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1975. Bakhtin's works and ideas gained popularity only 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

5782-455: The European novel. Dostoevsky does not describe characters and contrive plot within the context of a single authorial reality: rather his function as author is to illuminate the self-consciousness of the characters so that each participates on their own terms, in their own voice, according to their own ideas about themselves and the world. Bakhtin calls this multi-voiced reality "polyphony": "

5900-623: The Gregorian calendar. For example, the Battle of Blenheim is always given as 13 August 1704. However, confusion occurs when an event involves both. For example, William III of England arrived at Brixham in England on 5 November (Julian calendar), after he had set sail from the Netherlands on 11 November (Gregorian calendar) 1688. The Battle of the Boyne in Ireland took place a few months later on 1 July 1690 (Julian calendar). That maps to 11 July (Gregorian calendar), conveniently close to

6018-466: The Gregorian calendar. Similarly, George Washington is now officially reported as having been born on 22 February 1732, rather than on 11 February 1731/32 (Julian calendar). The philosopher Jeremy Bentham , born on 4 February 1747/8 (Julian calendar), in later life celebrated his birthday on 15 February. There is some evidence that the calendar change was not easily accepted. Many British people continued to celebrate their holidays "Old Style" well into

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6136-597: The History of Realism " 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 Genres " deals with

6254-514: 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 schematic model of the human psyche, consisting of three components: "I-for-myself", "I-for-the-other", and "other-for-me". The I-for-myself is an unreliable source of identity; Bakhtin argues that it is the I-for-the-other through which human beings develop

6372-430: The Julian and Gregorian dating systems respectively. The need to correct the calendar arose from the realisation that the correct figure for the number of days in a year is not 365.25 (365 days 6 hours) as assumed by the Julian calendar but slightly less (c. 365.242 days). The Julian calendar therefore has too many leap years . The consequence was that the basis for the calculation of the date of Easter , as decided in

6490-581: The Julian calendar had added since then. When the British Empire did so in 1752, the gap had grown to eleven days; when Russia did so (as its civil calendar ) in 1918, thirteen days needed to be skipped. In the Kingdom of Great Britain and its possessions, the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 introduced two concurrent changes to the calendar. The first, which applied to England, Wales, Ireland and

6608-517: The Julian date of the subsequent (and more decisive) Battle of Aughrim on 12 July 1691 (Julian). The latter battle was commemorated annually throughout the 18th century on 12 July, following the usual historical convention of commemorating events of that period within Great Britain and Ireland by mapping the Julian date directly onto the modern Gregorian calendar date (as happens, for example, with Guy Fawkes Night on 5 November). The Battle of

6726-486: The Novel" (1934–1935). It is through the essays contained within The Dialogic Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the concepts of heteroglossia , dialogism and chronotope , 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

6844-533: The Novel". In 1936, living in Saransk , he became an obscure figure in a provincial college, dropping out of view and teaching only occasionally. In 1937, Bakhtin moved to Kimry , a town located one hundred kilometers from Moscow. Here, he 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

6962-583: 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. Repression and misplacement of his manuscripts 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

7080-695: 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

7198-425: 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

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7316-652: The attention of the Francophone world, and from there his popularity in the United States, the United Kingdom, 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

7434-465: 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 ( carnivalesque ) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and

7552-559: 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 Juri Lotman ; in 1963 Roman Jakobson 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

7670-492: The combination of the two. It was through their use in the Calendar Act that the notations "Old Style" and "New Style" came into common usage. When recording British history, it is usual to quote the date as originally recorded at the time of the event, but with the year number adjusted to start on 1 January. The latter adjustment may be needed because the start of the civil calendar year had not always been 1 January and

7788-409: The concept in order to further demonstrate the distinctive quality of the novel. The word chronotope literally means "time space" (a concept he refers to that of Einstein) and is defined by Bakhtin as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature." In writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is forced to make use of

7906-509: The concept of dialogism . However, just as this book was introduced, on 8 December 1928, right before Voskresenie 's 10th anniversary, Meyer, Bakhtin and a number of others associated with Voskresenie were apprehended by the Soviet secret police, the OGPU (Hirschkop 1999: p. 168). The leaders received sentences of up to ten years in labor camps of Solovki , though after an appeal to consider

8024-505: The difference between Saussurean linguistics 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

8142-483: 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

8260-543: The end of the following December, 1661/62 , a form of dual dating to indicate that in the following twelve weeks or so, the year was 1661 Old Style but 1662 New Style. Some more modern sources, often more academic ones (e.g. the History of Parliament ) also use the 1661/62 style for the period between 1 January and 24 March for years before the introduction of the New Style calendar in England. The Gregorian calendar

8378-480: 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. According to Leslie Baxter , for Bakhtin, "all language use is riddled with multiple voices (to be understood more generally as discourses, ideologies, perspectives, or themes)" and thus "meaning-making in general can be understood as

8496-409: The first few pages are missing, and part one of the full text. However, Bakhtin's intentions for the work were not altogether lost: 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 provides an analysis of performed acts or deeds that comprise "the world actually experienced", as opposed to "the merely thinkable world." For

8614-439: The history of laughter, Bakhtin advances the notion of its therapeutic and liberating force, arguing that "laughing truth ... degraded power". The Dialogic Imagination (first published as a whole in 1975) is a compilation of four essays concerning language and the novel: " Epic and Novel " (1941), "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" (1940), "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937–1938), and "Discourse in

8732-442: The idea of carnivalesque in communication as she argues that it is found in corporate communication. Steele states "that ritualized sales meetings, annual employee picnics, retirement roasts and similar corporate events fit the category of carnival." Carnival cannot help but be linked to communication and culture as Steele points out that "in addition to qualities of inversion, ambivalence, and excess, carnival's themes typically include

8850-459: The idea that he is a psychologist). Dostoevsky's characters are, by the very nature of his creative design, " not only objects of authorial discourse, but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse. " Multi-voicedness ( Polyphony ), is essential to Dostoevsky: the world of his novel is constructed upon it, such that it can be said that this multi-voicedness is itself the primary object of his work. Each character, and each implied voice in

8968-490: The interplay of those voices." Bakhtin has been called "the philosopher of human communication". Kim argues that Bakhtin's theories of dialogue and literary representation are potentially applicable to virtually all academic disciplines in the human sciences. According to White, Bakhtin's dialogism represents a methodological turn towards "the messy reality of communication, in all its many language forms." While Bakhtin's works focused primarily on text, interpersonal communication

9086-439: The literary, as well as the meaning of the body and the material bodily lower stratum. In Rabelais and His World , Bakhtin intentionally refers to the distinction between official festivities and folk festivities . While official festivities aim to supply a legacy for authority, folk festivities have a critical centrifugal social function. Carnival, in this sense is categorized as a folk festivity by Bakhtin. In his chapter on

9204-559: The manuscript disappeared during the upheaval caused by the German invasion of 1941. After the amputation of a leg in 1938, Bakhtin's health improved and he became more prolific. In 1940, and until the end of World War II , Bakhtin lived in Moscow, where he submitted a dissertation on François Rabelais to the Gorky Institute of World Literature to obtain a postgraduate title, although the dissertation could not be defended until

9322-698: The mystery novel) into higher literary works of art by making constant references to one of Bakhtin's favorite subjects, Dostoyevsky . Old Style and New Style dates Old Style ( O.S. ) and New Style ( N.S. ) indicate dating systems before and after a calendar change, respectively. Usually, they refer to the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar as enacted in various European countries between 1582 and 1923. In England , Wales , Ireland and Britain's American colonies , there were two calendar changes, both in 1752. The first adjusted

9440-440: The novel's distinct nature by contrasting it with the epic . 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

9558-427: The open-ended dialogue of life is monologized—turned into a summary statement of its contents, but failing to recognize its unfinalizable nature. Bakhtin felt that the literary methods of Dostoevsky are far more adequate to the task of representing the reality of human interaction than scientific and philosophical approaches (including, and especially, psychology : Bakhtin emphasizes that Dostoevsky explicitly rejects

9676-411: The organizing categories of the real world in which the author 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 heteroglossia. The term heteroglossia refers to

9794-413: The other brings concretization, liberation from solipsistic self-absorption, new realities and new choices, but these do not exclude 'negative' possibilities. The dialogic encounter, since it implies intimacy and vulnerability, can involve increased suffering and susceptibility to the cruelty or stupidity of the other. As Emerson expresses it: "By having a real other respond to me, I am spared one thing only:

9912-446: The other for oneself. A person has no sovereign internal territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another ." In his early writings Bakhtin used the concepts of outsideness and the surplus to elucidate the necessary conditions for dialogical interaction. In one's view of the other there is a surplus of spatio-temporal objectivity necessitated by

10030-419: The other's position. In such a situation nothing new can come into existence: there is only a duplication of the closed circle of what already exists. For dialogue to be possible there must be a plurality of positions. The dialogic is thus alien to any theory that would tend towards a monologisation of views—for example, the dialectical process, or any kind of dogmatism or relativism . Of dialectics as

10148-403: The other, stili novi or stilo novo , abbreviated st.n. and meaning "(of/in) new style". The Latin abbreviations may be capitalised differently by different users, e.g., St.n. or St.N. for stili novi . There are equivalents for these terms in other languages as well, such as the German a.St. (" alter Stil " for O.S.). Usually, the mapping of New Style dates onto Old Style dates with

10266-505: The person themselves, can see "the clear blue sky against whose background their suffering external image takes on meaning". If the surplus is actively entered into the other's world, or the view from outside oneself is likewise engaged, the potential for new understanding comes into existence. In this sense dialogue has more profound implications than concepts such as 'empathy', or the social anthropologist's goal of understanding an alien culture from within , which involve trying to merge with

10384-460: The philosophy characteristic of his early works and towards the notion of dialogue . It was at this time that he began his engagement with the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky . Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics is considered to be Bakhtin's seminal work, a work in which he introduces a number of important concepts. The work was originally published in Russia as Problems of Dostoevsky's Creative Art ( Russian : Проблемы творчества Достоевского) in 1929, but

10502-426: 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

10620-399: 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. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays Bakhtin moves away from the novel and concerns himself with

10738-493: The realm of rhetoric and literature , 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

10856-551: The reflection of itself in its separateness. In the dialogic encounter "each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched." According to Caryl Emerson , Bakhtin does not suggest that the creative potential inherent in the dialogic encounter is necessarily benign. There is no guarantee that an individual's investment of herself in dialogue will necessarily yield 'truth', 'beauty', 'consolation', 'salvation', or anything of that kind (ideal goals often claimed by monologic philosophies or methods). Engagement with

10974-446: The reifying sciences, this codification is mistaken for reality, undermining both creative potential and true insight into past activity. The uniqueness of an event, that which cannot be reduced to a generalization or abstraction, is in fact what makes responsibility , in any meaningful sense, possible: "activity and discourse are always evaluatively charged and context specific." In theoretical transcriptions of events, which are based in

11092-492: The relation between utterances ( intertextuality ). Heteroglossia is "the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance ." 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 such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Immanuel Kant . In "Epic and Novel", Bakhtin demonstrates

11210-465: The revised version. He traces the origins of Menippean satire back to ancient Greece, briefly describes a number of historical examples of the genre , and examines its essential characteristics. These characteristics include intensified comicality, freedom from established constraints, bold use of fantastic situations for the testing of truth, abrupt changes, inserted genres and multi-tonality, parodies, oxymorons, scandal scenes, inappropriate behaviour, and

11328-644: The start of a new year from 25 March ( Lady Day , the Feast of the Annunciation ) to 1 January, a change which Scotland had made in 1600. The second discarded the Julian calendar in favour of the Gregorian calendar, skipping 11 days in the month of September to do so. To accommodate the two calendar changes, writers used dual dating to identify a given day by giving its date according to both styles of dating. For countries such as Russia where no start-of-year adjustment took place, O.S. and N.S. simply indicate

11446-710: The state of his health, Bakhtin's sentence was commuted to exile to Kazakhstan , where he and his wife spent six years in Kustanai (now Kostanay). In 1936, they moved to Saransk (then in Mordovian ASSR , now the Republic of Mordovia ), where Bakhtin taught at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute . During the six years he spent working as a book-keeper in the town of Kustanai , he wrote several important essays, including "Discourse in

11564-414: The theoretical world. One must start with the act itself, not with its theoretical transcription." According to Bakhtin, dialogue lives on the boundaries between individuals: not in the sense of a meeting between isolated entities that exist " within " the boundaries (he argues that there is no "within"), but actually on the boundaries themselves. In Bakhtin's view, "no living word relates to its object in

11682-408: The three subsequent and unfinished parts of Toward a Philosophy of the Act , Bakhtin states the topics he intended to discuss: the second part would have dealt 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 Bakhtin in the process of developing his moral system by decentralizing

11800-399: The very fact of its externality: "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... 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 ". Only the outside perspective, never

11918-420: 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

12036-548: The work caused much disagreement, and it was consequently decided that Bakhtin be denied his higher 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 (Russian: Творчество Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса, Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaja kul'tura srednevekov'ja i Renessansa ). In Rabelais and His World ,

12154-595: The work of Kant , with a focus on ethics and aesthetics . It is here that Bakhtin lays out three claims regarding the acknowledgment of the uniqueness of one's participation in Being: 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,

12272-516: The world", a way of thinking and experiencing that Bakhtin identifies in ancient and medieval carnival traditions, has been transposed into a literary tradition that reaches its peak in Dostoevsky's novels. The concept suggests an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the "joyful relativity" of free participation in the festival. According to Morson and Emerson , Bakhtin's carnival

12390-476: The world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future. On the individual level, this means that a person can never be entirely externally defined: the ability to never be fully enclosed by others' objectifications is essential to subjective consciousness. Though external finalization (definition, description, causal or genetic explanation etc)

12508-413: The worst cumulative effects of my own echo chamber of words." "Reified (materializing, objectified) images", Bakhtin argues, "are profoundly inadequate for life and discourse... Every thought and every life merges in the open-ended dialogue. Also impermissible is any materialization of the word: its nature is dialogic." Semiotics and linguistics, like dialectics, reify the word: dialogue, instead of being

12626-479: 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

12744-436: Was "critical of efforts to reduce the unfinalizable, open, and multivocal process of meaning-making in determinate, closed, totalizing ways." For Baxter, Bakhtin's dialogism enables communication scholars to conceive of difference in new ways. The background of a subject must be taken into consideration when conducting research into their understanding of any text, since "a dialogic perspective argues that difference (of all kinds)

12862-480: Was altered at different times in different countries. From 1155 to 1752, the civil or legal year in England began on 25 March ( Lady Day ); so for example, the execution of Charles I was recorded at the time in Parliament as happening on 30 January 164 8 (Old Style). In newer English-language texts, this date is usually shown as "30 January 164 9 " (New Style). The corresponding date in the Gregorian calendar

12980-426: 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 Bender , the picaro created by Ilf and Petrov , left its mark on Bakhtin." He later transferred to Petrograd Imperial University to join his brother Nikolai. It

13098-596: Was celebrated as the New Year festival from as early as the 13th century, despite the recorded (civil) year not incrementing until 25 March, but the "year starting 25th March was called the Civil or Legal Year, although the phrase Old Style was more commonly used". To reduce misunderstandings about the date, it was normal even in semi-official documents such as parish registers to place a statutory new-year heading after 24 March (for example "1661") and another heading from

13216-739: Was denied a higher doctoral degree ( Doctor of Sciences ) and granted a lesser degree ( Candidate of Sciences , a research doctorate ), 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

13334-575: Was diagnosed with osteomyelitis , a bone disease that ultimately led to amputation of a leg in 1938. This illness hampered his productivity and rendered him an invalid. In 1924, Bakhtin moved to Leningrad , 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

13452-496: Was implemented in Russia on 14 February 1918 by dropping the Julian dates of 1–13 February 1918 , pursuant to a Sovnarkom decree signed 24 January 1918 (Julian) by Vladimir Lenin . The decree required that the Julian date was to be written in parentheses after the Gregorian date, until 1 July 1918. It is common in English-language publications to use the familiar Old Style or New Style terms to discuss events and personalities in other countries, especially with reference to

13570-494: Was necessary to attribute authorship of these works to one person, Voloshinov and Medvedev respectively should receive credit. 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: in which discipline he worked (was he a philosopher or literary critic?), how to periodize his work, and even which texts he wrote (see below). He

13688-408: Was 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 was only after the archives became public that scholars realized that much of what they thought they knew about Bakhtin's life was false or skewed, largely by Bakhtin himself. Toward

13806-754: Was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s. Bakhtin was born in Oryol , Russia , 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 Oryol, in Vilnius , and then in Odessa , where in 1913 he joined the historical and philological faculty at the local university (the Odessa University ). Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist write: "Odessa..., like Vilnius,

13924-408: Was revised and extended in 1963 under the new title. It is the later work that is best known in the West. The concept of unfinalizability is particularly important to Bakhtin's analysis of Dostoevsky's approach to character, although he frequently discussed it in other contexts. He summarises the general principle behind unfinalizability in Dostoevsky thus: Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in

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