Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist

Abstract

The confusion and obscurity surrounding Mikhail Bakhtin's life compounded by the complexity and semantic density of his books and articles has made this Russian theorist into a kind of Zorro figure, the Masked Marvel of theoretical criticism. Who is this exotic character born in Orel in 1895, exiled to Kazakhstan during the 30s, returning finally to the center of Russian academic life in the 1950s? How is one to talk about Bakhtin's major book on the 18th-century German novel when Bakhtin used the only existing copy as cigarette papers during World War II? How are we to value a man who so undervalues himself that he stores unpublished manuscripts in a rat-infested woodshed in Saransk? What can one say about a writer whose very authorship is in question-since two of his major works (Freudianism and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) were published under the name of V. N. Voloshinov?' Add to this that Bakhtin is known as a literary theorist (and is thus remote indeed from composition and rhetoric), that he refuses to define his terms, and that his language resists interpretation and paraphrase and we have some idea of the formidable task ahead. To ignore Bakhtin because of these difficulties, however, is to deny rhetoric an important influence. Although much of Bakhtin's work is considered literary criticism, his conceptions of discourse develop implications about language use in the widest possible terms. Bakhtin modifies the communications triangle by 1. Scholars disagree on this point, which may never be resolved. In his introduction to The Dialogic Imagination, Michael Holquist explains that There is a great controversy over the authorship of three books that have been ascribed to Bakhtin: Freudianism (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929; 2nd ed. 1930), both published under the name of V. N. Voloshinov, and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), published under the name of P. N. Medvedev. ... The view of the present editor is that ninety percent of the text of the three books in question is indeed the work of Bakhtin himself' (xxvi). This is a reasonable conclusion. The ideas presented in these works are sufficiently complex and sophisticated that it is difficult to imagine two individuals writing so similarly at the same time within the same community. More likely, Voloshinov may have readily agreed to publish the works under Bakhtin's name so that the latter's ideas could be brought into academic currency. Some intellectual collaboration among the individuals in Bakhtin's circle was inevitable in any case. In the final estimate, it makes little difference whether there was one author named Bakhtin, or several