Dialogism in the Novel and Bakhtin's Theory of Culture

Abstract

AKHTIN'S INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION was well and truly established by the mid-1970s, primarily through Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and Rabelais and His World. impact of his ideas on contemporary intellectual life was greater still after the publication of Dialogic Imagination in 1981. volume comprises essays which were written during the 1930s but which were not published in Moscow until 1975. Two of them are central to this paper--Discourse in the Novel (1934-35) and Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel (1937-38). third essay of importance here, The Problem of Speech Genres (1952-53), appeared in Moscow in 1979 in a collection of unedited texts from the twenties and thirties and articles reprinted from several prominent Soviet journals.1 Bakhtin died in 1975. What is curious, however, about Bakhtin's brilliant ascent is that several substantial essays and three major books, which had been published during his lifetime under the names of Voloshinov and Medvedev, were now being included in his canon, but, paradoxically, excluded from his fame. books in question are Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) and Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1927), as Voloshinov, and Formalist Method in Literary Scholarship (1928) as Medvedev. Some opposition to the merger came principally from specialists of Russian literature who, aware of material claiming Bakhtin was the sole author of the texts cited, also knew that Voloshinov and Medvedev were scholars in their own right. sequence of events concerning claims made for Bakhtin-one allegedly by him shortly before he died-has been set out admirably by Irwin Titunik.2 A debate ensued concerning whether Bakhtin