Narrative, Modernism, and the Crisis of Authority: A Bakhtinian Perspective

Abstract

The ArgumentThe paper offers a reconstruction of one aspect of Bakhtin's philosophy, focusing on a deep-seated ambivalence that has been largely overlooked in studies based on his late works. Bakhtin's early work, 1920–23, is set within a distinctly metaphysical framework, an outlook that seems diametrically opposite to what has become known as the Bakhtinian conception of culture. That ideological rift is manifest in the different treatment of Dostoevsky's works (and, by extension, the different attitude to the secularization of Western culture) in these two phases.Extrapolating Bakhtin's perspective onto Dostoevsky's work, the paper briefly outlines a theory of modernism as a “crisis of authority,” with particular emphasis on the role of closure — i.e., retrospective framing, both literary and existential — in the absence of metaphysical grounding.Finally, the paper offers a comment on Bakhtin's wholesale assimilation into the postmodernist canon, in an attempt to problematize it and to reformulate some relevant and persistent questions on the significance of narrativity in human existence.