Page 206 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes In this light, the chronotope comes to function precisely as the primary principle that 'both defines
genre and generic distinction and establishes the boundaries between the various intrageneric
subcategories of the major literary types'.
The preface to the very first Flemish (historical) novel In it Wonderjaer (1837) testifies to the fact
that the genre of the novel was still largely unknown in Flanders in the 1830s: the author, Hendrik
Conscience, forewarns his public not to be frightened by the fact that he is presenting them with
a novel.
18.2 Bakhtin’s Concept of Polyphony

As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on the self, not merely in
terms of how a person comes to be, but also in how a person thinks and how a person sees him-
or herself truthfully.
Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky's work a true representation of "polyphony", that is, many
voices. Each character in Dostoevsky's work represents a voice that speaks for an individual self,
distinct from others. This idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unfinalizability and self-
and-others, since it is the unfinalizability of individuals that creates true polyphony.
Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic concept of truth. He criticized the assumption that, if two
people disagree, at least one of them must be in error. He challenged philosophers for whom
plurality of minds is accidental and superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a sentence
or a phrase. Instead, truth is a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically
inconsistent, statements. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a
single mind, it also cannot be expressed by "a single mouth". The polyphonic truth requires many
simultaneous voices. Bakhtin does not mean to say that many voices carry partial truths that
complement each other. A number of different voices do not make the truth if simply "averaged"
or "synthesized". It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the
context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from untruth.
When, in subsequent years, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Art was translated into English and
published in the West, Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept of "carnival" and the book was
published with the slightly different title, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics. According to Bakhtin,
carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish and interact together.
The carnival creates the "threshold" situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed
and genuine dialogue becomes possible. The notion of a carnival was Bakhtin's way of describing
Dostoevsky's polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time
the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is to say, the voices
of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.

18.3 From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse—
Critical Appreciation

Mikhail Bakhtin's essay "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" is a study on the history
and construction of modern language in novels.
Bakhtin's essay "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" is composed of three parts, each
offering a different component to his study of novelistic discourse. The first part is an introduction
to novelistic discourse; Bakhtin introduces the five stylistic approaches to novelistic discourse and
differentiates the novel from other forms of writing. The penultimate section of the essay focuses
ancient Greek literature and stories, specifically parody sonnets, and acknowledges its impact on
the current discourse in novels. In addition, the second portion of the essay incorporates the idea
of polyglossia-the coexistence of multiple languages in the same area-to illustrate the challenges of
construction a common vernacular within literature. The final part of the essay references the
Middle Ages, medieval texts, and works from the Bible to show the growth of novelistic discourse
through time (in comparison to the Greek texts).
Bakhtin's incorporation of the history of the Bible in relation to the term "polyglossia" offered a
careful approach to one of the most unifying texts in the world. Bakhtin calls the Bible "authoritative

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