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114-519: Holquist and Emerson chose the essays from a collection of six essays by Bakhtin published in Moscow under the title Вопросы литературы и естетиҡи ( Voprosy literatury i estetiki ; Problems of Literature and Aesthetics). According to Holquist, the unifying theme of the essays is "the novel and its relation to language." The title refers to the central place of the concept of dialogue in Bakhtin's theory of

228-591: 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

342-620: 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

456-452: 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

570-516: 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

684-515: 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

798-569: 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

912-479: 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

1026-489: 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

1140-449: 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

1254-818: 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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1368-563: 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

1482-501: 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

1596-422: 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

1710-436: A living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes one’s “own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation,

1824-414: 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',

1938-591: 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

2052-494: 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

2166-880: 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. Repression and misplacement of his manuscripts would plague Bakhtin throughout his career. In 1929, "Problems of Dostoevsky's Art", Bakhtin's first major work,

2280-462: A range of novelistic prototypes, beginning with the ancient Greek Romance and proceeding historically to the work of Rabelais , Bakhtin analyzes the ways in which configurations of time and space ( Chronotopes ) have been represented in narrative literature. In undertaking such an analysis, Bakhtin is again concerned with demonstrating the capacity of novelistic prose to present a more profound image of people, actions, events, history and society. In

2394-554: 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

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2508-566: 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 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

2622-480: 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

2736-442: 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

2850-509: 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 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

2964-568: A single cultural system". This interaction effectively destroys the myth of singularity and inherent unity assumed by each language/cultural system, and creates a new cultural paradigm in which each can be seen in the light of the other. Parody hints at the absurdity of absolute or 'serious' language by presenting a humorous image of the genre or discourse that is its object. Parodic forms were common in ancient, medieval and renaissance times, and Bakhtin contends that there were no serious genres that did not have some form of parodic 'double'. Covering

3078-434: 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 a form of monologization Bakhtin wrote: "Take

3192-469: A unity of worldview that does not permit the development of an alienated interiority of the soul, or indeed any form of behaviour, interpretation or language that is at variance with it. The epic takes place in an absolute past and speaks in an absolute language; the novel expresses the non-coincidence between hero and environment, and as such becomes an artistic medium for the genuinely new (novel) – in dialogue, temporal development and consciousness. Unlike

3306-611: 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

3420-418: 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

3534-468: 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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3648-399: 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

3762-478: 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

3876-468: 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 the person themselves, can see "the clear blue sky against whose background their suffering external image takes on meaning". If

3990-613: 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

4104-403: Is inherently dialogic, and the novel is the literary genre that has the greatest capacity to artistically represent this reality. According to John Sturrock , for Bakhtin the novel is "the most complete and the most democratic of genres, coming as close as it is possible for an artform to come to capturing the multiplicity, richness and zest of life itself." Problems of Literature and Aesthetics

4218-445: Is intrinsically shaped, historically and in each individual speech act, by qualities such as perspective, evaluation, and ideological positioning, and in this fundamental sense is not amenable to the science of linguistics. Every word is inextricably bound to the context in which it exists, the intention of the speaker, and the intentions of other speakers of the same word, and cannot be reduced to an abstraction. According to Bakhtin: As

4332-480: 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

4446-416: 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

4560-443: 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

4674-435: 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 the very fact of its externality: "In order to understand it

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4788-680: The Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he 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

4902-399: The philosophy of language . His writings, on 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

5016-442: 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 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

5130-610: 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

5244-437: 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

5358-468: 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

5472-488: 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

5586-456: 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": "

5700-598: 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

5814-515: 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

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5928-487: 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

6042-501: The Novel" (1937–38); "Discourse in the Novel" (1934). The editors provide an introduction placing the essays within the context of Bakhtin's conception of language, and a glossary explaining his extensive and idiosyncratic technical vocabulary. In this essay, Bakhtin identifies the distinguishing features of the novel as a genre by contrasting it with the epic. The essential difference lies in what Emerson, following Lukacs , refers to as "the gap between self and society". The epic expresses

6156-533: 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

6270-695: 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

6384-426: 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

6498-652: 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

6612-465: 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

6726-403: 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 a singular way". Between the speaking subject, the word, and its object there exists "an elastic environment of other words about

6840-560: 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

6954-411: 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

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7068-433: The course of his life, dialogue always remained the "master key" to understanding his worldview. Bakhtin described the open-ended dialogue as "the single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life". In it "a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into

7182-433: The dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium." 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 a pre-existing set of rules to which they conform or structure that they exhibit. This forgets that

7296-505: 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

7410-483: 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

7524-523: The epic, the novel happily incorporates other genres, and thrives on a diversity of worldviews and ways of speaking about the world. Bakhtin analyses a number of texts from the distant past in terms of their embodiment of a force that he calls 'novelness', which is indicated in them more as a potential than as a realized genre. The primary constituents of this force are polyglossia and parody (or 'laughter'). Polyglossia refers to "the simultaneous presence of two or more national languages interacting within

7638-482: 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

7752-458: The final essay, Bakhtin provides a model for a history of discourse and introduces the concept of heteroglossia . Heteroglossia is the reflection in language of varying ways of evaluating, conceptualizing and experiencing the world. It is the convergence in language or speech of "specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values." Language

7866-411: 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

7980-496: The historical and philological faculty at the local university (the Odessa 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 Bender ,

8094-440: 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

8208-443: 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

8322-459: 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

8436-537: The imagined, but not actually present, rejoinders of an other voice. Mikhail Bakhtin 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

8550-462: The intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. The novel as a genre and the novelist as an artist are uniquely suited to portraying the heteroglot reality of language and social discourse. Any form or use of language can enter into the world of the novel, and the novelist must be adept at harnessing this multiplicity for "the orchestration of his themes and for

8664-495: 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

8778-441: 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

8892-507: 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

9006-440: 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

9120-496: The novel. The novel, unlike other literary forms, embraces heterogeneity in discourse and meaning: it re-creates a reality that is based on the interactions of a variety of subjective consciousnesses and ways of thinking and speaking about the world. In this sense novelistic discourse undermines absolute or authoritative (monologic) language, which is revealed to be merely one form of ideological expression operating within an essentially intersubjective medium. Language, in Bakhtin's view,

9234-427: 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

9348-413: 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

9462-413: 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:

9576-461: 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

9690-429: The potential to undermine the centripetal (homogenising, hierarchising) forces and tendencies of language and culture through its exploitation of centrifugal (decrowning, decentering, dispersing) forces. Dialogue (Bakhtin) The twentieth century Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote extensively on the concept of dialogue . Although Bakhtin's work took many different directions over

9804-426: 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

9918-400: 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

10032-494: 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

10146-551: 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

10260-399: The refracted expression of his intentions and values." Language is relativised in the novel and is dialogic in nature: monologic language, language with pretensions to a unitary authority, becomes suspect, since it implies the exclusion of other voices, calcifying discourse and effacing the heteroglot reality that is the essence of living social discourse. In Bakhtin's terminology, the novel has

10374-486: 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 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,

10488-446: 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

10602-498: 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

10716-465: 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

10830-456: 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 the theoretical world. One must start with the act itself, not with its theoretical transcription." According to Bakhtin, dialogue lives on

10944-465: 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 the other for oneself. A person has no sovereign internal territory, he

11058-712: 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

11172-406: 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 the other's position. In such

11286-409: 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

11400-420: 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

11514-404: The word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of the dictionary that a speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions… Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated –overpopulated– with

11628-549: 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 ,

11742-596: 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,

11856-516: 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

11970-478: 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)

12084-413: 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

12198-480: 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

12312-437: 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)

12426-739: 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

12540-496: 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

12654-409: 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

12768-408: Was published in 1975 and The Dialogic Imagination in 1981, but Bakhtin actually wrote the essays forty years earlier. Holquist and Emerson arranged the essays according to their relative complexity, from the simplest to the most difficult, rather than chronologically. The essays are: " Epic and Novel " (1941); "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" (1940); "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in

12882-559: Was published. It is here that Bakhtin introduces 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

12996-410: 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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