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Literary Criticism and Theories                               Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University



                  Notes              Unit 16: Mikhail Bakhtin and his ‘From the Prehistory of
                                      Novelistic Discourse-Dialogics in Novels: Introduction




                                   CONTENTS
                                   Objectives
                                   Introduction
                                   16.1 Early Life of Mikhail Bakhtin
                                   16.2 Career
                                   16.3 Works and Ideas
                                   16.4 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
                                   16.5 Summary
                                   16.6 Key-Words
                                   16.7 Review Questions
                                   16.8 Further Readings


                                 Objectives

                                 After reading this Unit students will be able to:
                                 •    Know Early Life of Bakhtin.
                                 •    Discuss Career, Works and Ideas of Bakhtin.
                                 •    Explain Speech Genre and Other Late Essays.
                                 Introduction

                                 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar
                                 who worked on literary theory, ethics, and 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, 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 was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s.
                                 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. He 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 the claims that all discourse is in essence a dialogical exchange and that this
                                 endows all language with a particular ethical or ethico-political force.
                                 As a literary theorist, Bakhtin is associated with the Russian Formalists, and his work is compared
                                 with that of Yuri 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 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 Earnest Cassirer, Max Scheler and, to a lesser extent,



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