Cognitive processes in text interpretation: Rereading Bakhtin

Abstract

This article shows how the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin anticipated many of the concepts relating to texts that have been advanced in cognitive science in recent decades. For example, Bakhtin's emphasis on schemas of actions and events, space and time, is remarkably commensurate with recent approaches in semantics and discourse theory. But there is another dimension to Bakhtin that makes his work all the more valuable: the way in which textual elements of genre and linguistic code are grounded in history. I argue on this basis that genre (and the various conventions associated with it), has important epistemological dimensions. Here I bring Bakhtin's work into dialogue with the more recent discourse processing theory of Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch, to draw out more explicitly the implications for text interpretation that his work contains.