Bakhtin's Concept Research Articles

From Narrative to Reality: The Inter/Trans Discourse of Bakhtin’s Chronotopes and Lyotard’s Metanarratives

Abstract: Examining the historical and social geography of a nation requires studying the time and the space so as to give rise to a discourse exploring how people interact with each other as well as with their nation. Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope unveils how the inter/trans textual and contextual relationships of narrative time and space intersect with historical moments to generate interactive involvement with certain temporal and geographical scales in the real world. Discussing the chronotopicity of a society is also associated with Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of metanarratives (aka grand narratives); his ideologies are complementary to Bakhtin's use of the chronotope as an analytical lens; theirs is an inter/trans discourse. The paper seeks to underline the interactive inter/trans discourse between reality and literary narratives from an intertwined Bakhtinian and Lyotardian approach. The article also attempts to accentuate the homogeneity of the concepts of the chronotope and metanarrative because an interactive chronotopic-metanarrative approach facilitates involvement with the reality and makes the oscillation between the fictional and the real possible. Keywords: Chronotope, narrative, time, space, paralogy

Reconfiguring the Chronotope

Abstract This article adopts Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the chronotope to analyze the 2015 film Laopaoer 老炮兒 (Mr. Six), directed by Guan Hu 管虎 and starring Feng Xiaogang 馮小剛, exploring its representation and reconfiguration of the real as well as the imagined time-spaces of Beijing. Revolving around generational conflicts against the grain of a globalized and gentrified Beijing, Mr. Six creates a strong nostalgic appeal and laments the withering of mores from the past. The film not only attends to the physiognomic remapping of contemporary Beijing but also incorporates topographical imaginaries from the culture of the martial arts. By invoking hybrid sites of memory, Guan Hu mobilizes cultural legacies associated with Beijing and creates a palimpsestic urban chronotope. Furthermore, this article compares Mr. Six to its literary and filmic predecessors, probing its insights and oversights in restoring cultural memories and in capturing the zeitgeist of contemporary China. With gaps and conflicts on textual, contextual, and intertextual levels calling into question the efficacy of Mr. Six's exposé of China's social stratification and urban gentrification, the stories in, of, and around Mr. Six reiterate the coordination between cultural elites and consumer culture.

A Brief History ofO!

AbstractIn the poetry of many nations, the interjection O! is a marker of poeticalness, a marker that contributes to the factors distinguishing poetry from colloquial speech. O! is treated not so much as an expression derived from the language in which a given poem was written (i.e., English, Italian, Polish, etc.) as a common lexeme within an international poetic language. In different countries, the interjection O! is understood in similar ways and does not require translation, even if the other parts of the poem are rendered in distinct languages. Despite the importance of the interjection in world literature, research into the semantics of O! has been limited in scope. The aim of this article is to trace the main stages of development that O! has undergone in European poetry from antiquity until the present day. The article initially discusses the semantic variants of the interjection in ancient Greek and Latin poetry. These derive from two functions of O!, functions that are described within the context of the Bakhtinian concepts of the addressee and superaddressee. Subsequently, the process in which the autonomy of this lexeme was shaped with regard to vernacular languages is considered. The examples illustrating this process have been taken from Bulgarian, English, French, German, Italian, Occitan, and Polish poetry.

Bakhtin's Concept of Dialogue in the Context of the Process of Changing General Scientific Paradigms

Bakhtin's Concept of Dialogue in the Context of the Process of Changing General Scientific Paradigms

Patterns of Russia: History, Culture, Spaces by Robin Milner-Gulland

Reviewed by: Patterns of Russia: History, Culture, Spaces by Robin Milner-Gulland Sergei Bogatyrev Milner-Gulland, Robin. Patterns of Russia: History, Culture, Spaces. Reaktion Books, London, 2020. 237 pages. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Further reading. Index. £25.00. In his book, Robin Milner-Gulland seeks to build up a distinctive portrait of Russia through the study of a few themes and moments in its history. He is particularly interested in locations and landmarks that witnessed the development of Russia and its culture. The methodology of the book is diverse. Milner-Gulland draws on Bakhtin's concept of the 'chronotope' as a dynamic interaction between space and time. By way of analogy, Milner-Gulland offers the notion of 'cultural spaces' which implies the intersection between geography and history. The book has been also influenced by the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school (Iu. M. Lotman, D. S. Likhachev, B. A. Uspenskii) and scholarship on the creation and exploitation of sacred space (Mircea Eliade, A. M. Lidov). Finally, Milner-Gulland engages Anthony D. Smith's concept of 'ethnoscape' ('landscapes endowed with poetic ethnic meaning through [End Page 188] the historicization of nature and the territorialization of ethnic memories'). Milner-Gulland interprets Russia's ethnoscape as its cultural consciousness. Chapter one seeks to define Russia in terms of the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) and the great rivers that articulate the Russian space. In Chapter two, the author looks at the built environment, including wooden architecture, medieval churches, and some later palaces, but not fortifications (apart from the Golden Gates in Vladimir). Chapter three deals with art and artists in Old Russia. The author dwells on the social status of icon painters as craftsmen because Old Russia lacked the overarching concept of 'art'. Chapter four is devoted to art and place. It examines some famous works of art from different periods, including two sixteenth-century objects which have the word 'place' in their established names: the so-called 'Tsar's Place' (i.e. Ivan IV's pew) in the Dormition Cathedral and the Place of the Skull in Red Square, both in Moscow. In chapter five the author discusses the sacred places of Russia which are usually associated with various representations of Jerusalem. The author treats the subject in the context of the notion of Holy Russia, though the origin of this idea is as obscure as its meaning. In chapter six, 'Petersburg: Foundation and Fate' Milner-Gulland notes that there was a combination of practical and ideological motifs behind Peter I's project of the new capital. The author calls our attention to the legends about the foundation of Petersburg which are usually dismissed by historians as fantasies. Here Milner-Gulland develops a cultural approach to the history of St Petersburg advanced by Lindsey Hughes (1949–2007), his former student and a leading specialist on Peter I. The author movingly acknowledges Hughes as a source of his inspiration. In chapter seven, the author returns to the north to reflect on the Solovki Transfiguration Monastery as an ultimate symbol of Russia. He traces the history of the monastery from its foundation in the fifteenth century through the Soviet period, when the Bolsheviks turned the monastery into a concentration camp, to the post-Soviet revival of the religious institution. Smith has introduced his concept of 'ethnoscape' in an attempt to strike a balance between two approaches to ethnicity, one that posits that ethnic connections are universal, natural and primordial (hence, primordialist approach) and another that sees ethnicity as a tool whose configuration changes depending on its various uses, a strategic choice, a construct (thus, constructivism). Milner-Gulland clearly leans towards primordialism as he assumes the existence of some perennial structures or patterns in Russian culture. This is why his chapters often end with forays into Soviet culture to demonstrate alleged continuity from the middle ages to the twentieth century. But can we really assume that culture and identities have remained unchanged since the period of Kyivan Rus'? The best parts of the book are based on Milner-Gulland's personal experience of visiting different parts of Russia. The publisher, Reaktion Books, [End Page 189] did a great of job on visualizing Milner-Gulland's...

Dialogical Structure Experience in Basic Design Studio at Online Education

In this study, the structure of the basic design studio that started with face-to-face education and had to end with online education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was set over Bakhtin's dialogic concept, is discussed. The three main components of the basic design studio; studio space, studio process and studio content and the combination of these components have changed in the transition from face-to-face education to online education. With these changes, dialogic relations are defined in the basic design studio's setup that extends from the face-to-face to the online education, and a structure that is shaped not as a sharp transition but as a flow has been developed. The basic design studio structure, which is shaped by the concept of dialogue, is presented as an approach proposal for online education, which is still ongoing and is expected to continue.

From story to book: Discourse analysis between teacher and student in the creation of a culturally relevant text

Lack of representation of children from nondominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds continues to be problematic in children’s literature, and especially within early literacy texts for beginning readers. One remedy is for children to tell their own stories through the language experience approach, which can then be printed into culturally relevant texts and used for beginning reading material in classrooms. To truly capture a student’s story, especially if the student is an emergent bilingual, a teacher must listen very closely and take care when adjusting the child’s story. Two Bakhtinian concepts support the careful examination of a teacher’s scribing of story in this study: chronotope, used here as the time-space sphere above the text, and revoicing, or the retelling of a child’s story that is paraphrased or altered. Findings show that gesture within the chronotope of the story is an especially generative tool for student storytelling and that teachers must reflect closely on intentional or unintentional reasons for revoicing a child’s story. Language experience approach holds possibilities for the creation of children’s culturally relevant texts. As such, it is important that teachers reflect on their language experience approach techniques so that the book remains true to the child’s story.

The Matrix:

Film as a visual art form can be understandably perused as a form of “visual literature” where, under proper scrutiny, literary theories and critical concepts may be found intervening significantly. Stretching the range of “cine-literacy,” an approach to interpret films from a literary/theoretical perspective, suggests simultaneously the pervasive reach and the inter-disciplinary scope of literature. This article aims at addressing the aspects of the 1999 movie The Matrix that enable it as a congenial site for Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to operate. There is hardly any linguistic phenomenon, verbal or non-verbal, that can negate its affiliations with the Bakhtinian theory of dialogism which affords a disentanglement of the dialogic properties operative in the phenomenon and thus attempts to excavate its philosophical roots as well as the diversity of implications. The Matrix, as a form of communicative event captured in celluloid that attempts to convey some messages to the audience, corroborates the idea further and the film indeed illustrates the ways dialogism and other Bakhtinian precepts are imbricated in the cinematized fiction. What an enumeration of Bakhtinian concepts in the movie allows is an articulation of the movie’s rich diversity of meaning and implications. The film has been approached from Bakhtin’s theoretical perspective with a view to addressing the adaptability of the filmed fiction with the central tenets of his theory of dialogism. Furthermore, a dialogical perspective of the film unearths its underlying mosaic of philosophical imbrications that ultimately endorses its intrinsic quality of multiplicity of meaning.

Literature as a Social Mirror and a Cultural Tool For Protest

In a letter to Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels confessed that he learned more from Honore de Balzac about the French society than from all the books of all the historians, economists and statisticians of the time put together. Literary art has always presenteditself as a social mirror, exposing the reflection of the society in which the writer was inserted, but to what actual extent can Literature reveal and interpret human behavior and society? To what extent can it expose, condemn, and be the engine of its transformation?As Bakhtin's conception argues, the social function of literature as a space for critical reflection, makes, particularly the works that bring the tendency of realistic theory, raise the analysis and weighting of the subject in relation to the society in which they areinserted. This, alongside with the obvious fact that literature is part of the culture of a given society and, therefore, it reveals social patterns that have been considered relevant, and which will help to decipher its mutations, progress and ways of manifesting culture, reveals the value of Literature as an instrument of the social sciences since it allows us to understand what the primary factors of a society are and how they affect it. In this paper I will explain in more detail how literature does then reflect the environment the author lives in and, therefore, its society, to the point where you can identify political, social, economic and several other factors, and use it as a tool to expose and protest many injustices, both if narrating the present or the past, as it is never too late to give a voice to the wronged.

Biopolitical Foundation of The Theory of M.M. Bakhtin's Carnival

Bakhtin is an ambiguous thinker, who manifests himself as well in the political interpretation of his ideas. The political context of Bakhtin's thought is mostly considered based on the work “Rabelais and His World”. The article aims to identify the meaning structures of Bakhtin's work on Rabelais, which determine the political interpretation of his concept. The highlighted meaning structures are interconnected. They represent a series of Bakhtin's theses on the classificatory character of the division of cultural consciousness, on the decline of the laughter principle, etc. These theses form a coherent narrative that can be interpreted in completely different ways. Bakhtin's concept may be presented by interpreters in liberal or leftist way, as well as deeply conservative. These interpretations are based on different understandings of the status of carnivalization, which is essentially identical to the phenomenon of transgression. Accordingly, the second aim of the article is to show how Bakhtin understood transgression. To contextualize Bakhtin's concept of carnivalization, some of his points, which are similar to the ones made by the theorists of the ambivalent sacred (J. Bataille and R. Caillois) are considered. But a fact remains that requires explanation: Bakhtin's thought does not fit well into the framework of one or another political interpretation. As an explanation, a hypothesis of the biopolitical basis of Bakhtin's concept is put forward. The Agamben's figure of naked life constituted by sovereign power is contrasted with the Bakhtin's figure of material-bodily bottom, as the idea of the collective immortality of the people.

Transforming authoritative discourse: mediating cogenerative dialogues between scientists and high school students

ABSTRACT Working with scientists can be an effective way of engaging high school students in science inquiry. The communication gap between scientists and students, however, can be a barrier to teaching and learning. This qualitative study introduced cogenerative dialogues (cogens), which, due to their emancipatory and democratic nature, appear to be a useful tool to improve communication between scientists and students. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of addressivity in dialogism, this study investigated the effective strategies used by an exemplary mediator. Ten effective strategies are identified and illustrated with examples. The findings of this study are a useful reference for educators to train dialogue mediators to enhance learning in different educational settings.

Opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education

The aim of this interpretative, qualitative research study is to investigate affordances and constraints of dialogic pedagogy in the museums, as well as its broader contribution to society today. The background is my involvement in a Danish development project called ‘Museums and Cultural Institutions as Spaces for Citizenship,’ initiated by seven art museum educators in Copenhagen and supported by the Ministry of Culture. Denmark has a strong dialogic tradition dating back to Grundtvig’s belief in the power of ´the oral word’ to foster democratic ‘Bildung.’ Museum education, on the other hand, has a long tradition of monologic transmission. Still, a more participatory pedagogy has been gaining ground over many years.
 This study is based on the observations of three-hour-long teaching sessions in seven museums and has a Bakhtinian framework. While the overall analysis builds on the whole project, two cases are discussed in more detail. The overarching research question is how central aspects of dialogic pedagogy played out in an art museum context and its opportunities and challenges. The subquestions focus on three central Bakhtinian concepts: How did the educators facilitate multivoicedness during the short museum visits? What role did difference and disagreement play? What opportunities emerged for students to develop internally persuasive discourse? I have chosen these concepts because they are central in dialogism and combined them because they are closely connected in Bakhtin’s work. The final reflections open a wider perspective of how dialogic museum education may contribute to overarching functions of education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification.
 Key findings were that the museum educators’ transition from traditional to dialogic pedagogy was enhanced by their genuine interest in hearing students’ voices. They succeeded in engaging students in multivoiced dialogues but with a tendency towards harmonization rather than the exploration of diversity and difference. The practical aesthetic workshops offered unique opportunities for students to develop their internally persuasive word, i.e., by replacing authoritative interpretations of artworks with their own. Challenges experienced by the educators were, e.g., the dilemmas between preplanning and student choice and between disseminating their professional art knowledge and facilitating students’ meaning making and creativity. In contrast, students found the lack of workshop follow-up problematic.
 The article provides deeper insight into museums as an alternative pedagogical arena. Museum educators and non-museum classroom teachers may find it useful for cultivating greater dialogic interactions in respective learning contexts.

Milk and Miracles: Heteroglossia and Dissent in Venetian Religious Art after the Council of Trent

This essay investigates Benedetto Caliari's Nativity of the Virgin (1576) with its provocative and unorthodox depiction of a bare-breasted wet-nurse in the context of both Protestant and Catholic criticism of “indecent” religious imagery. Reformers on both sides drew a connection between the Virgin Mary's ostentatious display of her lactating breasts and her presumed, derided, or hoped-for miracle-working capacities or intercessory powers. In post-Tridentine Venice, several artists, including Tintoretto and Veronese, all of whom were connected to the Scuola de’ Mercanti that commissioned Caliari's painting, employed religious breastfeeding imagery in a wide array of iconographies in order to express dissent with the Counter-Reformation church's emphasis on orthodoxy. In contrast to writers, artists were able to claim a certain degree of nonconformity and freedom from prosecution. In light of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, it is argued that religious lactation imagery after Trent produced irony, parody, doubt, and dissent.

Motivation, imagined self, and speech genres: Bakhtinian considerations

The present study aims to investigate Japanese language learners' motivation and their future Japanese self-images from the perspective of dialogical theory (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). Bakhtin assumes that any use of language is dialogue between self and other, or mind and world, and that it is through the acquisition of speech genres of a language historically shared in society that various types of self emerge. Through the analysis of interview data obtained from two Japanese-as-a-second-language learners, the present study illustrates how their study of the language is motivated by their desire to engage in dialogue with others, present or imagined, who speak the language. By focusing on speech genres as mediation between self and other, it also shows how an individual future Japanese self-image is connected to the social practices of the Japanese-speaking community through the medium of the speech genres. Based on these findings, the present study argues that Bakhtin's concept of speech genres provides a framework for analyzing complex interactions between the individual learner's motivation, self and the socio-historical context, and thus, has the potential to expand the conceptual basis of language learning motivation studies.

Tristan und Isolde at the Margins of Music-Analytical Discourse: A Dialogic Perspective

Whether or not the Prelude to Richard Wagner's 1859 music drama Tristan und Isolde is the most analyzed piece in the history of Western music, owing to its ongoing canonical status, it behooves us to consider how it has affected the field of music analysis over the past 150 years. More than any other piece, Wagner's Prelude is able to expose the many conflicts that arise between analytical approaches: while it can demonstrate the limits of one particular approach vis-à-vis another, it may also reveal new potentialities that divergent analyses offer when seen from an intertextual point of view.<br/> As a test case, this article will position three contemporaneous analyses of the opening measures of the Prelude against one another: Horst Scharschuch's post-Riemannian harmonic analysis and Jacques Chailley's style-historical analysis, both from 1963, and William Mitchell's Schenkerian analysis of 1967. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of "dialogism" and "heteroglossia," I will trace a broader historiographical and intertextual network surrounding the history of analyzing Tristan, with the goal of refocusing our analytical priorities around this work and penetrating the continuities and discontinuities between competing analyses. In this way, the article aims at opening up a further dialogic space in music analysis, both in our historical considerations and in the way we approach analysis as an intertext—that is, by traversing the fissures in the reified verities of a "unified" analysis and the multiple interpretative transpositions underlying our deciphering of analytical texts. It will conclude by offering yet another interpretation of Wagner's famous chord.

Children's humour and the grotesque pleasures in school mealtime socialisation

AbstractIn this paper, we argue for two propositions: children are socialised and guided to become competent members of school mealtime community, and children have the capacity to modify and challenge existing practices. We draw on Bakhtin's concepts of the carnivalesque laughter and grotesque realism to illustrate how children use humour to test the boundaries of what is permitted. Children's mealtime interactions foster the development of social skills to subvert and negotiate adult authority and manage unfolding interactions between children and adults. We present findings from a child‐centred perspective in a primary school in the United Kingdom.

Teaching Philosophy Statement and Ideological Becoming

The writing of a teaching philosophy statement can be interpreted as a dynamic component in the development of the teacher’s system of ideas, their ideological self. In this article of reflection, I examine the exercise of reflection and personal growth that the development of a personal educational philosophy promotes according to some writing guidelines available. Through a documentary method, I argue the assumptions of the beliefs in question to interpret them under bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia and ideological becoming. The examination of heteroglossia in the text of a TPS increases the awareness of individual teaching activity connected to broader social, cultural, and political practices built through writing. These considerations are intended to connect the activities of educators with the possibility of more democratic societies.

Teaching Philosophy Statement and Ideological Becoming

The writing of a teaching philosophy statement can be interpreted as a dynamic component in the development of the teacher’s system of ideas, their ideological self. In this article of reflection, I examine the exercise of reflection and personal growth that the development of a personal educational philosophy promotes according to some writing guidelines available. Through a documentary method, I argue the assumptions of the beliefs in question to interpret them under bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia and ideological becoming. The examination of heteroglossia in the text of a TPS increases the awareness of individual teaching activity connected to broader social, cultural, and political practices built through writing. These considerations are intended to connect the activities of educators with the possibility of more democratic societies.

Play as the leading activity of the preschool period

Cultural-historical psychology identifies play as the leading activity in preschool development. Vygotsky's (1967, 1978) seminal work outlined two categories of leading influences: play makes a foundational contribution to the development of semiotic mediation, and it involves active appropriation of social roles and rules and other integral aspects of social organization. Leont'ev's (1981) concept of appropriation and Bakhtin's (1981) concepts of heteroglossia and ideological becoming are used to elaborate and extend Vygotsky's original work, particularly with regard to creativity in preschool play. The paper concludes with a consideration of the pedagogical implications of the cultural-historical view on play, including the use of play to cultivate understanding of the arbitrary nature of signs and the appropriation of the social roles and organizational patterns of society.

Developing Critical Thinking Among Inter-Level Students of Bannu Through Dialogic Pedagogy

The aim of the study is to explore the role of dialogic teaching, based on Bakhtin's concept of 'Dialogism', in developing critical thinking among students of intermediate level in District Bannu. The experimental research design was used in the study. Data was collected from the pre and post-tests of an experimental study, which was carried out on the 12th grade class of a public sector college. For this purpose, a pretest-posttest control group design was selected. In this design, the control group and treatment group were administered pre and posttests, but treatment was provided to the treatment group only. The test was designed to assess the critical thinking of the treatment group. The data from an experimental study was analyzed through paired sample t-test. The mean value of the difference between post-test and pretest of the treatment group is 7.16129, which indicates that the performance of the treatment group improved significantly, proving the positive role of dialogic teaching.