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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

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

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

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

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

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 …

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 …

Introduction, James K. Lyon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue on Paul Celan

Zamyatin's We And The Idea Of The Dystopie, Margaret Lael Mikesell, Jon Christian Suggs

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

An examination of We clarifies conventions for the dystopic novel even as it reveals that We transcends those conventions. Under the surface text, which presents a narrative of political and "romantic" struggle, lie subtexts exploring the personal and ideological implications of the conflict between reason and emotion. Analysis of these texts, seen in a New Comedy framework informed by elements of irony and romance, demonstrates that on every level the novel fails to reach comic resolution. Moreover, it is this very failure that marks the departure of We from the conventions of the dystopic novel. Like Brave New World and …

The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno To Paradiso, David Matual

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It is apparent from the title of his novel The First Circle and from various details there and in other works that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is familiar with at least the imagery of Dante's Divine Comedy. One direct and several indirect references to it also suggest a Dantean subtext in his longest and most ambitious project, The Gulag Archipelago. Indeed, the loci of the Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—are transformed in the Gulag into metaphorical representations of the various stages in the development of man's consciousness—and especially Solzhenitsyn's consciousness—during the ordeals of arrest, inquest, imprisonment, …

The Function Of Love In Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, John Schillinger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, like Boris Pasternak before him, insists upon the primacy of life over any socio-political system. To lead truly meaningful lives, his characters must comprehend that they are responsible for their own actions; that they are engaged in an existential struggle which pits individual freedom against the will of authority.

In The First Circle, this struggle is clearly reflected in the theme of love which, when analyzed in terms of the suppression or triumph of its four basic elements (sex, eros, philia, and agape), offers a convincing allegory of man's existential self-definition by free choice.