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3.3
3.2
3
idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unnalizability and self-and-others, since it is the unnalizability
of individuals that creates true polyphony.
Bakhtin briey 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 superuous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a
sentence or a phrase. Instead, understanding is a number
of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically
inconsistent, statements. Understanding 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 reallife event, that distinguishes underatanding from misunderstanding.
When, in subsequent years, Problems of Dostoyevskys 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 dierent title,
Problems of Dostoyevskys Poetics. According to Bakhtin,
carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices
are heard, ourish 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 Bakhtins way of
describing Dostoevskys polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly dened, and at the same time the
reader witnesses the critical inuence 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.
3.3
Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevskys work a true representation of "polyphony", that is, many voices. Each
character in Dostoevskys work represents a voice that
speaks for an individual self, distinct from others. This A classic of Renaissance studies, in Rabelais and His
Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel introduces Bakhtins concept of chronotope. This essay applies the concept in order to further demonstrate the distinctive quality of the novel.[27] The word chronotope literally means time space and is dened by Bakhtin as
the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.[28]
For the purpose of his writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is forced to make use of
the organizing categories of the real world in which he
lives. For this reason chronotope is a concept that engages
reality.[29]
5
The Problem of Speech Genres" deals with the dierence 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 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, scientic, etc.[33]
The Problem of 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 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.[34]
4 Disputed texts
Some of the works which bear the names of Bakhtins
close friends V. N. Voloinov 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 the early
1970s and received their earliest full articulation in English in Clark and Holquists 1984 biography of Bakhtin.
In the years since then, however, most scholars have
come to agree that Voloinov and Medvedev ought to be
considered the true authors of these works. Although
Bakhtin undoubtedly inuenced these scholars and may
even have had a hand in composing the works attributed
to them, it now seems clear that if it was necessary to attribute authorship of these works to one person, Voloinov and Medvedev respectively should receive credit.[37]
Bakhtin had a dicult life and career, and few of his
works were published in an authoritative form during his
lifetime.[38] 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 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 Englishfrom French rather than from Russianas
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.
From Notes Made in 1970-71 appears also as a collection of fragments extracted from notebooks Bakhtin kept
during the years of 1970 and 1971. It is here that Bakhtin
discusses interpretation and its endless possibilities. Ac- 5 Legacy
cording to Bakhtin, humans have a habit of making narrow interpretations, but such limited interpretations only
As a literary theorist, Bakhtin is associated with the
serve to weaken the richness of the past.[35]
Russian Formalists, and his work is compared with that
The nal essay, Toward a Methodology for the Human of Yuri Lotman; in 1963 Roman Jakobson mentioned
Sciences, originates from notes Bakhtin wrote during him as one of the few intelligent critics of Formalism.[39]
the mid-seventies and is the last piece of writing Bakhtin During the 1920s, Bakhtins work tended to focus on
produced before he died. In this essay he makes a dis- ethics and aesthetics in general. Early pieces such as
tinction between dialectic and dialogics and comments on Towards a Philosophy of the Act and Author and Hero
the dierence between the text and the aesthetic object. in Aesthetic Activity are indebted to the philosophical
It is here also, that Bakhtin dierentiates himself from trends of the timeparticularly the Marburg School
the Formalists, who, he felt, underestimated the impor- Neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen, including Ernst
tance of content while oversimplifying change, and the Cassirer, Max Scheler and, to a lesser extent, Nicolai
Structuralists, who too rigidly adhered to the concept of Hartmann. Bakhtin began to be discovered by scholars in
code.[36]
1963,[39] but it was only after his death in 1975 that authors such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov brought
Bakhtin to 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, Bakhtins work experienced a surge of
popularity in the West.
LEGACY
7
5.2.2
Sheckels contends that what [... Bakhtin] terms 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.[55] 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 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 t the category of carnival.[56] Carnival cannot help but be linked to communication and culture as Steele points out that in addition to qualities of inversion, ambivalence, and excess, carnivals themes typically include a fascination with the body, particularly its
little-gloried or 'lower strata' parts, and dichotomies between high or low..[57] 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 Bakhtins native Russia, where postmodernist writers such as Boris
Akunin have worked to change low brow communication forms (such as the mystery novel) into higher literary works of art by making constant references to one of
6 Bibliography
Bakhtin, M.M. (1929) Problems of Dostoevskys Art,
(Russian) Leningrad: Priboj.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1963) Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, (Russian) Moscow: Khudozhestvennaja literatura.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1968) Rabelais and His World.
Trans. Hlne Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1975) Questions of Literature and
Aesthetics, (Russian) Moscow: Progress.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1979) [The] Aesthetics of Verbal
Art, (Russian) Moscow: Iskusstvo.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London:
University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1990) Art and Answerability. Ed.
Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans.
Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom. Austin:
University of Texas Press [written 19191924, published 1974-1979]
Bakhtin, M.M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the
Act. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist.
Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (19962012) Collected Writings, 6
vols., (Russian) Moscow: Russkie slovari.
Bakhtin, M.M., V.D. Duvakin, S.G. Bocharov
(2002), M.M. Bakhtin: Conversations with V.D. Duvakin (Russian), Soglasie.
Bakhtin, M.M. (2004) Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics in Teaching Russian Language in Secondary School. Trans.
Lydia Razran Stone. Journal of Russian and East
European Psychology 42(6): 1249.
Bakhtin, M.M. (2014) Bakhtin on Shakespeare:
Excerpt from Additions and Changes to Rabelais.
Trans. Sergeiy Sandler. PMLA 129(3): 522537.
8 NOTES
See also
Dialogical Self
Hubert Hermans
Lev Vygotsky
Menippean satire
Nikolai Marr
Pavel Medvedev
Voskresenie
Notes
[10] Hirschkop 2
[12] Bakhtin 54
[13] Bakhtin 41
[49] Kim, Gary. Mikhail Bakhtin: The philosopher of human communication (54).. The University of Western
Ontario Journal of Anthropology 12 (1): 5362.
[50] White, E.J. akhtinian dialogism: A philosophical and
methodological route to dialogue and dierence?" (PDF).
[51] Kim, Gary (2004). Mikhail Bakhtin: The philosopher
of human communication.. The University of Western
Ontario Journal of Anthropology 12 (1): 5362 [54].
[52] Bakhtin, Mikhail (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Texas: University of Austin. p. 91.
[53] Kim, Gary (2004). Mikhail Bakhtin: The philosopher of
human communication. The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology 12 (1): 5362 [54].
[54] Baxter, Leslie (2006). Communication as...:Perspectives
on theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publishing, Inc.
p. 102.
[55] Sheckels, T.F. (2006). Maryland politics and political
communication: 1950-2005. Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books. p. 35.
[56] Goodman, M.B. (1994). Corporate communication: Theory and Practice. Albany: SUNY. p. 242.
[57] Goodman, M.B. (1994). Corporate communication: Theory and Practice. Albany: SUNY. p. 249.
References
Boer, Roland (d), Bakhtin and Genre Theory in
Biblical Studies. Atlanta/Leiden, Society of Biblical
Literature/Brill, 2007.
Holquist, Michael.
Introduction to Mikhail
Bakhtins The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
Austin and London: University of Texas Press,
1981. xv-xxxiv
Brandist, Craig. The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics London, Sterling, Virginia:
Pluto Press, 2002.
Klancher, Jon. Bakhtins Rhetoric. Landmark Essays on Bakhtin, Rhetoric, and Writing. Ed. Frank
Farmer. Mahwah: Hermagoras Press, 1998. 23-32.
10
Maranho, Tullio (1990) The Interpretation of Dialogue University of Chicago Press ISBN 0-22650433-6
Meletinsky, Eleazar Moiseevich, The Poetics of
Myth (Translated by Guy Lanoue and Alexandre
Sadetsky) 2000 Routledge ISBN 0-415-92898-2
Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail
Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford University
Press, 1990.
O'Callaghan, Patrick. Monologism and Dialogism
in Private Law The Journal Jurisprudence, Vol. 7,
2010. 405-440.
Pechey, Graham. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the
World. London: Routledge, 2007. ISBN 978-0415-42419-6
Schuster, Charles I. Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical
Theorist. Landmark Essays on Bakhtin, Rhetoric,
and Writing. Ed. Frank Farmer. Mahwah: Hermagoras Press, 1998. 1-14.
Thorn, Judith. The Lived Horizon of My Being: The Substantiation of the Self & the Discourse
of Resistance in Rigoberta Menchu, Mm Bakhtin
and Victor Montejo. University of Arizona Press.
1996.
Townsend, Alex, Autonomous Voices: An Exploration of Polyphony in the Novels of Samuel
Richardson, 2003, Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles,
Frankfurt/M., New York, Wien, 2003, ISBN 9783-906769-80-6 / US-ISBN 978-0-8204-5917-2
Sheinberg, Esti (2000-12-29). Irony, satire, parody
and the grotesque in the music of Shostakovich. UK:
Ashgate. p. 378. ISBN 0-7546-0226-5. Archived
from the original on 2007-10-17.
Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester University Press, 1997
Voloshinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language. New York & London: Seminar Press.
1973
Young, Robert J.C., 'Back to Bakhtin', in Torn
Halves: Political Conict in Literary and Cultural
Theory Manchester: Manchester University Press;
New York, St Martins Press, 1996 ISBN 0-71904777-3
Mayerfeld Bell, Michael and Gardiner, Michael.
Bakhtin and the Human Sciences. No last words.
London-Thousand Oaks-New Delhi: SAGE Publications. 1998.
Michael Gardiner Mikhail Bakhtin. SAGE Publications 2002 ISBN 978-0-7619-7447-5.
10
EXTERNAL LINKS
10 External links
The Bakhtin Circle, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Bakhtin Centre (University of Sheeld)
A Bakhtin prole (James P. Zappen)
Bakhtin Timeline
INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY - The
Battle over Mikhail Bakhtin by Matt Steinglass in
Lingua Franca (April 1998)
Philology in Runet. A special search through the M.
M. Bakhtins works.
Carnival, Carnivalesque and the Grotesque Body
Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith
excerpts from Rabelais and his world
Page on Bakhtin with a photo
Absurdist Monthly Review - The Writers Magazine
of The New Absurdist Movement
Polyphony of Brothers Karamazov likened to Bach
fugue [Shockwave Player required]
Description of Bakhtins work and how it was discovered by Western scholars
Languagehat blog on the veracity of the smoking
incident
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Images
11.3
Content license