"Alien Word" and Centon: Aspects of the Theory of M.M. Bakhtin

Abstract

This article contains a conceptual description of the problematics of "foreign word" in the general literary methodology of analysis by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975), and a description of its individual theoretical aspects. The subject of the study is Bakhtin's concept of "foreign word". The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as "alien speech", "alien consciousness" in the context of the ideas of M.M. Bakhtin, as well as his student and colleague in the "Nevelsk-Vitebsk seminar" - Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895-1936). Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the centon genre, which in the history of verbal culture has become a source of creative discoveries and innovative techniques for various authors. The analyzed aspects of Bakhtin's theory allow us to draw an important conclusion about the distinctive features of the organization of a literary text in modernist and postmodernist literature. The organization of the artistic text in modern postmodern literature occurs in accordance with the principles of centonicity and quotation, i.e. cultural mediation of most artistic artifacts. The main difference between postmodern works and most reminiscent works of modernism is that allusions and reminiscences cease to perform the function of references to universally valid concepts, but work in the centonal mode (dramatically rethinking the original context - up to its leveling, "dissolution", "spraying" ) organization of a literary text.