Page 198 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes studies were published (some of them for the first time) in Soviet Russia and were translated in the
main Western languages. It is hard to assess whether his spectacular late career is due in the first
place to the innovatory nature of his concepts and critical analyses or to his sensational biography
that came to be known to the public as late as the 1960s. Indeed, there were quite a few spicy
detective story ingredients attached to it: a bone disease in his youth which led to the amputation
of one leg, his internment in a Soviet death camp in the 1930s - a sentence that was then commuted
to internal exile, his de facto disappearance from public life for several decades (which may have
saved his life during the Stalin years), the discovery by the literary students in the late fifties that
the author of the reputable book on Dostoevsky was not dead and lived somewhere in the provinces,
his low profile to the very end despite the growing popularity his studies were enjoying.
Bakhtin did not belong to either of the formalist circles in Soviet Russia, but was claimed by some
of their members, including Jakobson, to be in their ranks. In actual fact what his studies do share
with formalism is the attempt to define the specific devices which articulate a literary genre as
different from others. Also he was interested in the literary structure per se, analyzing its dynamic
function within the historical traditions, particularly its subversive roles. Yet, his field of inquiry
extends well beyond the formalist concerns, as he researched not only the literary language, but
also other socio-ideological forms of expression, such as the carnivalesque one. The sweeping
cultural preoccupations of this literary theorist and philosopher of language explain why he was
described in turns as a formalist, Marxist, phenomenologist, proto-deconstructionist, or even as an
orthodox Christian militant by some Slavists.

Bakhtin was the first and foremost theorist of one genre, the novel, which he
contrasted with poetry (as in music polyphonic compositions differ from
monophonic ones).

Bakhtin could not have been a Marxist proper, although here and there he criticized the formalists
for neglecting the sociological factors. His main principles and concepts surpass by far the
reductionist determinism of classical Marxist tenets. However, he associated himself with two
avowed Marxists, Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev, and the paternity of several orthodox
Marxist articles is hotly disputed even today by commentators between the three authors: one of
these studies is a sharp attack against the Formalist School (the 1928 book The Formal Method in
Literary Scholarship, written either by Medvedev or by Bakhtin), which may have contributed to
the definitive banning of the movement.
Out of Bakhtin's plentiful and seminal contributions to the philosophy of language and of culture
as well as to literary theory we will focus our attention, within the framework of our study, on his
insights which are more closely connected with the formalist issues, such as the dialogic mode and
the uses of language in prose writings, particularly in the novel .
In the first phase of his career Bakhtin's interests were mainly retained by the complex relationships
between ethics and aesthetics, between self and other: he propounded a "philosophy of the act"
which relied on Kantian categories. His studies written in the second phase of his activity (about
1924-1930) are hallmarked by the discovery of the dialogic potential of the word and the
"polyphonic" mode of writing. His cornerst one study, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, came out
in 1929.
In the following two decades, despite the obstacles which life in an entirely ideologized country
set before an independent intellectual like Bakhtin, he produced the most substantial concepts for
a "prosaic" description of the novel, such as novelistic consciousness and the chronotope. "Discourse
in the Novel", "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse", and "Forms of Time and of the
Chronotope in the Novel" were written in that period. The Chronotope is Bakhtin's term for the
specific sense of space and time (in other words the social and the historical components) which
characterizes every genre, according to its specific ideology. If in the ancient works the social

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