Page 182 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES
P. 182
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,
176 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY