On Mikhail Bakhtin and human studies (with continual reference to Moscow and Sheffield)

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay was reconstructed and upgraded from lecture notes for a keynote address delivered, with modest visuals, on 28 October 2016 at the University of Sheffield, U.K. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of its program in Russian and Slavonic Studies. Academic home to both the Bakhtin Centre (founded in 1994) and the Prokhorov Centre (founded 2014), Sheffield includes among its past and present faculty several prominent scholars who have worked on Bakhtin: David Shepherd, Craig Brandist, and Evgeny Dobrenko. It made sense for me, as their States-side colleague and an old Bakhtin hand, to discuss their contributions to the humanities in the context of USA Bakhtin studies. My benchmarks here are Randall Poole, Gary Saul Morson, Mikhail Epstein and Michael Holquist, Bakhtin scholars whose work also represents a spectrum of defenses for human studies – from past-oriented to future, from metaphysical justifications to cybernetic ones. The faint allusion, in the title, to Kierkegaard’s 1841 dissertation 'On the concept of irony (with continual reference to Socrates)' will hopefully be revealed by the end as not wholly ironic.