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Articles 1 - 18 of 18
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Introduction, Michael Holquist
Introduction, Michael Holquist
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Introduction to the special issue on Mikhail Bakhtin
Bakhtin And Buber: Problems Of Dialogic Imagination, Nina Perlina
Bakhtin And Buber: Problems Of Dialogic Imagination, Nina Perlina
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Recent publications of biographical materials on Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrate that he was familiar with the writings of Martin Buber. The philosophical and aesthetic verbal expression of Buber's ideas within the time-spatial universe of Bakhtin's own awareness allows us to discuss this obvious biographical evidence in a wider cultural context. The central opposition of Buber's and Bakhtin's systems is the dialogic dichotomous pair: "Ich und Du" (I and Thou), or "myself and another." Bakhtin's dialogic imagination is rooted in the binaries of the subject-object relations which he initially formulated as "responsibility" and "addressivity," that is to say, as individual awareness and …
Characters In Bakhtin's Theory, Anthony Wall
Characters In Bakhtin's Theory, Anthony Wall
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
A common focus in many modern theories of literature is a reassessment of the traditional view of the character in a narrative text. The position that this article defends is that a revised conception is necessary for an understanding of the means by which dialogism is said to function in novelistic discourse. Revising the notion does not, however, involve discarding it outright as recent theories of the subject would have us do. Nor can we simply void it of all "psychological" content as suggested by many structuralist proposals. To retain Bakhtin's concept of the notion of character, we must understand …
Bakhtin's "Theory" Of Genre, Clive Thomson
Bakhtin's "Theory" Of Genre, Clive Thomson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The originality of Bakhtin's fragmentary and partial theory of literary genre is underlined in this article. Bakhtin's reflexion on genre is very different from that of his Formalist contemporaries. Instead of proposing elaborate typologies or generic categories, Bakhtin more often devotes his attention to showing that a meaningful approach to the topic must be diachronic. From an epistemological point of view, the possibility of exact duplication or repetition of the same generic device from text to text is denied. Each text (or reading of a text) is a new performance in which generic material is reworked and re-presented. There are …
Polyphonic Theory And Contemporary Literary Practices, M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski
Polyphonic Theory And Contemporary Literary Practices, M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This paper briefly explores some of the ways in which Mikhail Bakhtin reaffirms the principle of the non-identity yet inseparability of theory and practice in literary criticism. The lesson is one which stresses the need to disentangle the critical discourse from idealistic theoretical issues and engage in a materialist practice of criticism. If polyphonical dialogism (especially with respect to contemporary polyphony) is not to be confused with dialectics, then the most urgent and perhaps the most difficult task for the critic facing a polyphonic narrative is to negotiate the text in terms of the socio-historical actuality of the transformation which …
The Relevance Of The Carnivalesque In The Québec Novel, Maroussia Ahmed
The Relevance Of The Carnivalesque In The Québec Novel, Maroussia Ahmed
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The Bakhtinian concept of space is topological rather than topographic, and encompasses the cosmic, the social and the corporeal; its function in the Québec novel consists in debasing the hierarchical verticality of Lent and of the "official feast." As Carnival is an anti-law,"law" in the Québec novel will be defined as the chronotope of the sacred space (the land or "terre" of Québec) in the genre known as the "novel of the land" ("le roman de Ia terre"). Until the Second World War, this chronotope transforms an Augustinian political view of the civitas dei into literary proselytism, via the ideology …
Bakhtin And Tolstoy, Ann Shukman
Bakhtin And Tolstoy, Ann Shukman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article is a study of the way Bakhtin compared and contrasted Dostoevsky and Tolstoy throughout his career. Special attention is given to Bakhtin's two "Prefaces" of 1929 and 1930 to Resurrection and to the dramas in the Collected Literary Works edition of Tolstoy. Bakhtin's view of Tolstoy is not as narrow as is generally thought. Tolstoy is seen as one of many figures of European literature that make up Bakhtin's literary consciousness. He serves as a point of contrast with Dostoevsky and is described as belonging to an older, more rigid, monologic tradition. Bakhtin's prefaces to Tolstoy's works are …
M. M. Bakhtin In Russian Culture Of The Twentieth Century (Translated By Ann Shukman), M. L. Gasparov
M. M. Bakhtin In Russian Culture Of The Twentieth Century (Translated By Ann Shukman), M. L. Gasparov
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article by M.L.Gasparov was first published at Tartu in the Soviet Union in 1979 and has been translated and edited here with notes by Ann Shukman. Gasparov emphasizes four aspects of Bakhtin's thought: "his zeal for expropriating 'the other's word' "; "his zeal for dialogue"; "a nihilistic selection of values"; "the opposition of the novel to poetry." Ann Shukman's commentary places Gasparov's article in context.
Dialogic Imagination In The Book Of Deuteronomy, Robert Polzin
Dialogic Imagination In The Book Of Deuteronomy, Robert Polzin
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
One of the profoundest insights into the syntax of narrative is the complex system of relationships between reporting and reported speech worked out in programmatic form by Voloshinov-Bakhtin in a number of groundbreaking studies (for example, in English translation, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language by V.N. Voloshinov and The Dialogic Imagination by Bakhtin). Interesting literary insights into texts that have been studied and interpreted over centuries and even milennia now await the application by present-day scholars of Bakhtin's theories. The Book of Deuteronomy offers a unique opportunity within the Bible of applying the reported/reporting speech approach of Bakhtin. The …
Bakhtin And Intergeneric Shift: The Case Of Boris Godunov, Caryl Emerson
Bakhtin And Intergeneric Shift: The Case Of Boris Godunov, Caryl Emerson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay draws on the historical and artistic image of Boris Godunov to illustrate Bakhtin's concept of "re-accentuation," or the transfer of literary images to new contexts. Russia of the 19th century was particularly well served by the Boris Tale. It inspired her first great popular historian, her greatest poet, and one of her greatest composers. Nikolai Karamzin's History of the Russian State (1816-29) ended with the Time of Troubles, and Karamzin's treatment of Boris Godunov became a model for biography in this new "romantic-national" type of history. Out of Karamzin's portrait Alexander Pushkin created his "romantic tragedy" Boris Godunov …
Narrative Discourse As A Multi-Level System Of Communication: Some Theoretical Proposals Concerning Bakhtin's Dialogic Principle, Paul Thibault
Narrative Discourse As A Multi-Level System Of Communication: Some Theoretical Proposals Concerning Bakhtin's Dialogic Principle, Paul Thibault
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article attempts to show that the dialogizing of narrative discourse is a way of de-naturalizing the fictional process and its associated textual activities by reconstituting the material interplay of voices (in Bakhtin's pioneering sense). It is this interplay which is suppressed by the convention of a single, univocal narrative position. This corresponds to Bakhtin's notion of monologic discourse, which implies an already given, objectified identity lying behind the text. Dialogic discourse restores to textual practice the material interplay of frequently opposing and contradictory semantic and ideological positions which actively constitute the formation of discourse. These voices which are constantly …
At The Outer Limits Of Language: Mallarmé'S Un Coup De Dés And Huidobro's Altazor, Nancy B. Mandlove
At The Outer Limits Of Language: Mallarmé'S Un Coup De Dés And Huidobro's Altazor, Nancy B. Mandlove
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
While it is quite possible that Un Coup de dés served Huidobro directly as a formal, thematic and linguistic model for Altazor, the essential connection between the two poems lies in a parallel effort to repeat the act of the original Creation. To this end, both rely on basic archetypal patterns, resulting in parallel thematic development. These archetypal patterns are created not only themati-cally, but also linguistically. The fall, destruction and resurrection of Adam and Orpheus is simultaneously the fall, destruction and resurrection of language. Huidobro has taken up the challenge of Mallarmé to spin out of nothingness the …
Numa And The Nature Of The Fantastic In The Fiction Of Juan Benet, David K. Herzberger
Numa And The Nature Of The Fantastic In The Fiction Of Juan Benet, David K. Herzberger
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Perhaps the most rewarding critical approach to the novels of Juan Benet is one that encompasses the irrational and seeks to reveal the mysterious— one that can be closely identified with the notion of the fantastic. The view of the fantastic developed in the present study is based on a synthetic modification of the precepts of Todorov and Rabkin, and places emphasis on the hesitation of the reader when confronted with a diametric reversal of the laws of the text. Both the literary theory and prose fiction of Benet can be closely linked to the fantastic: the former through Benet's …
Space And Salvation In Colette's Chéri And La Fin De Chéri, Ann Leone Philbrick
Space And Salvation In Colette's Chéri And La Fin De Chéri, Ann Leone Philbrick
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Colette's critics often seem to dismiss all but her autobiographical creatures as whimsical and inarticulate. Her characters are frequently less eloquent than the spaces they create and inhabit; this observation offers an approach to Chéri and La Fin de Chéri that invites us to read them as two of Colette's most ambitious and authentic works. Here are stories of compromises with the containers of one's life and identity: streets, salons, boudoirs, and, ultimately, the body. Indeed, the self and its containers function symbiotically. Chéri makes no effort to direct this relationship, and kills himself when the world finally seems inscrutable …
Vital Space In The House Of Buendía, Nina M. Scott
Vital Space In The House Of Buendía, Nina M. Scott
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In terms of both narrative and thematic organization, Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude deals with tightly-closed structures. Whereas from the beginning Macondo has been interpreted in a variety of ways, critics have paid less attention to the meaning of the Buendía house itself. A close reading of the text shows that the way in which certain characters interact with the physical spaces of the house is highly symbolic and closely related to the thematic development of the entire novel. The rise and fall of the Buendía dynasty is presided over by three women, who function as the …
Circumscription: Proust's The Captive And The Problem Of Other Minds, Carol De Dobay Rifelj
Circumscription: Proust's The Captive And The Problem Of Other Minds, Carol De Dobay Rifelj
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Central to Proust's Remembrance as a whole and to The Captive in particular is Marcel's attempt to discover what other people think and feel. But, as reading the work in the light of modern analytic philosophy shows, his efforts are thwarted by the deceptions of others and by his own irreconcilable views. The other is radically inaccessible, yet the object of our search; the self is a stable entity, yet multiple, changing, and a fiction constituted by language; language is communication, yet the source of error. These are the problems which confront philosophy and literature when they try to come …
The Doubles In Julien Gracq's Au Château D'Argol, Andrée Douchin-Shahin
The Doubles In Julien Gracq's Au Château D'Argol, Andrée Douchin-Shahin
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In Julien Gracq's Au Château d'Argol, the resolution of a psychological double (as in the Doppelgänger novels) opens onto a metaphysical quest. In the process, doubling becomes so compounded that the narrative resembles a kaleidoscopic pattern of multiple reflections. Gracq's personal search into the nature of man is set against other hypotheses and formulations such as philosophical systems, religion, psychoanalysis, literature, music, etc. In the novel, man's dualism is viewed as an inescapable fact. However, even though the dogma of the Redemption is rejected, man, in spite of his "flaw," is held responsible for the acts he wills.
Inverted Reality In Nabokov's Look At The Harlequins!, D. Barton Johnson
Inverted Reality In Nabokov's Look At The Harlequins!, D. Barton Johnson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Look at the Harlequins! presents itself as the autobiography of a famed Anglo-Russian writer who suffers from bouts of insanity that are connected with his feeling that he is the inferior copy of another, much better writer. The autobiography is devoted mainly to his four great loves and to his books. Close analysis suggests that the narrator's account is false and is essentially a record of his delusive life during periods of insanity. LATH is seen as an example of those of Nabokov's novels that have schizoid narrators, such as The Eye, Despair, and Pale Fire, and …