Bakhtin's Work Research Articles

Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin's Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls “a crisis of authorship.” The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within the longue durée context of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

Listening to Dissonance in Second-Language Classrooms

This article reports on a study investigating ways students from Japan studying English as a second language at an American community college encounter cultural dissonance in their classroom interactions. I take a sociocognitive view rooted in the work of Bakhtin and Vygostky to explore the ways language, culture, and cognitive processes interplay in the heteroglossic spaces of second language classrooms. Multiple data sources are analyzed using a voice-centered method (The Listening Guide) affording a window into the oftentimes taken for granted and implicit ways cultural dissonance impacts language learning. Findings suggest that utilizing dissonance to enhance rather than suppress target language dialogue requires(1) raising awareness of the ways teachers and students conceptualize the relationship of culture to language and (2) articulating strategies that provide spaces for multiple points of view around beliefs, values, and norms to be voiced.

A HORA DA ESTRELA: A INTERTEXTUALIDADE ENTRE LISPECTOR E AMARAL

the aim of this article is to present a study of the book A Hora da Estrela (1977), by Clarice Lispector, and of the film with the same title directed by Suzana Amaral, (1985), having as theoretical reference specialists in the works of Bakhtin, who makes reference to the intextextual relations, which appear in texts of different genres and styles, as well as in the literary work and the film.

Obvious pretence: for fun or for real? Cross‐cousin and international relationships in Sri Lanka

Rather than understanding ‘lying’ or deception as a weapon of the oppressed, I use a Machiavellian and Nietzschean framework to investigate linguistic technologies of power that involve deception in contemporary Sri Lanka. My argument is based on distinct speech events collected in the village of Udahenagama and elite circles in Colombo: youthful flirtations, ritual negotiations with spirits, conversations with government officials and soldiers, a reported presidential diplomatic exchange, and everyday village banter. I highlight how the focus of the deceptive recorded interactions is revelation, rather than concealment, and I thereby propose a supplementary translation of the practice of telling boru, as obvious pretence. Obvious pretence is an important aspect of Sinhala linguistic technologies of power which imbue interdependent micro‐ and macro‐level political spheres. I use Bakhtin's work on tones to describe how ‘obvious pretence’ intertwines, on the one hand, a tone of domination, aggression, and superiority, and, on the other hand, a tone of accommodation, conflict avoidance, and courtship. An aesthetic of power – as the power to deceive – lies in the tension between those two opposing tones, which are encompassed within the single linguistic and pragmatic practice of ‘obvious pretence’.

Seeking inclusion and pluralism: Two exploratory studies.

This article describes 2 exploratory studies on the psychology of justice inspired by Morton Deutsch. The 1st study, a prequel to my research on moral exclusion, describes observations in a tundra that led to a follow-up pilot study on the streets of New York City. The 2nd study on pluralism sought to examine the relationship between taking another's perspective and broadening the scope of justice, or moral inclusion. Findings from this study suggest the difficulties of perspective taking. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, Klein, and several psychologists, I describe a multiphonic perspective attentive to the complexities of an appreciation of Morton Deutsch's influential teaching and scholarship that has inspired students, scholars, and activists. Although the article describes methods, data, and results, its focus is on theory. This is apt for a collection honoring Pioneer of Peace Psychology Morton Deutsch, for theory and its application to the human condition is at the center of his contributions to con...

Architectonics, Rhetoric, and Poetics in the Bakhtin School's Early Phenomenological and Sociological Texts

Bakhtin's work from the late 1920s and 1930s on the novel has been the principal source for critical discussion of his views of rhetoric and poetics—a discussion in which both arts are deprecated—but his early phenomenological work on architectonics and Voloshinov's early sociological work provide alternative sources that offer fresh terms for rethinking these discursive practices. The phenomenological works permit us to reconceptualize rhetoric as the primary discourse of active evaluative being-in-the-world and poetry as an imitation of that discourse that makes it available for aesthetic contemplation. The sociological work preserves the relation of speaker/agent to the other that the phenomenological work emphasizes and adds to it a relation of speaker to listener. The translation of the phenomenological terms to a sociological register brings the theory closer to life and history.

Circo social e práticas educacionais não governamentais

A pesquisa qualitativa em tela tenta analisar o circo social cujo objetivo refere-se à inclusão social de jovens das periferias através das artes do circo. Algumas práticas desenvolvidas por organizações educacionais não governamentais no contexto das políticas públicas neoliberais serviram-nos de recorte. Para tal selecionamos como referências teóricas a genealogia de Michel Foucault, o conceito nietzscheano de arte trágica, de cultura cômica popular em Bakhtin e de circo através de seus pesquisadores no Brasil. Indagamos: como vem se dando a aliança, não mais da filantropia com a ciência, mas atualmente com as artes, particularmente o circo? Estaria a arte sob o domínio de uma nova tecnologia?

Re-expressing the division of British medicine under the NHS: The importance of locality in general practitioners’ oral histories

This paper, based on original oral history research in a single locality, re-examines the impact of the structural division of British medicine, especially between community and hospital-based medicine, on rank-and-file general practice. Interviews were carried out with 29 retired and practising National Health Service (NHS) general practitioners (GPs) in Paisley, Scotland. In contrast to the historiography and literature of academic general practice, most retired and working family doctors who were interviewed rejected the significance of the division, and instead placed emphasis on the positive relationships between primary and secondary care in their locality. Particular stress was placed by these interviewees on the significance of local medical relationships in crossing the divide between primary and secondary medical practice. An analysis of the oral testimonies, informed by the work of Bakhtin [(1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press] and Schrager [(1983). What is social in oral history? International Journal of Oral History, 4(2), 76–98] identified multiple discourses within single accounts. These discourses contained ‘dialects’ that suggested a commonality of beliefs, especially when social and clinical networks were detailed, but they also contained ‘traces’ of oppositional narratives. These ‘traces’ of alternative perspectives suggest both the power of imagined solidarity and the exclusion of a minority of practitioners. Thus imagined solidarities, based on the making of local identities, combined with imagined oppositional positions, in which those who were constructed as not belonging were given voice. We argue that, to understand alliances between community and hospital medicine it is necessary to appreciate the position of the excluded. Those family doctors who were identified in the oral histories as outsiders tended to serve the more deprived populations. The role of private medicine was especially significant in the process of exclusion, especially the pattern of general practice referrals of patients from the NHS to secondary private care.

“Sometimes a Community and Sometimes a Battlefield”: From the Comedic Public Sphere to the Commons of Speakers' Corner

Speakers' Corner in London is perceived as a space in which people speak freely without state interference; it is also popularly known as a place in which eccentrics and others, without access to mainstream media, orate. In this paper I explore Speakers' Corner as a discursive space, seeking to find a way through its polarised representations as a free space of serious and important deliberation and as a degraded trivial public sphere. I do so through the concept of the comedic public, which loosely draws upon Bakhtin's work on the carnival but also differs in significant ways. At the same time I argue that Speakers' Corner should not just be read or evaluated in terms of the public speech generated; the Corner is also a place in which communities form and strangers interact with others in counternormative ways. I argue that these social dimensions, often neglected, constitute an important aspect of the Corner's practice; they are also dimensions generated and incited by the Corner's discursive qualities. To illustrate this further I consider the expression of emotion, engagement in combative debate, and heckling as junctures through which social interactions arise. Finally, I suggest the social dimension to the Corner might productively be understood through the concept of the commons.

Penultimate Words: The Life of the ‘Loophole’ in Mikhail Bakhtin

Penultimate Words: The Life of the ‘Loophole’ in Mikhail Bakhtin

Bakhtin: Ethics and Mechanics by Valerie Z. Nollan

I I94 Reviews an entire alternative lifestyle to the urban bourgeoisie. Builders' pattern books offered and realized arcadian dreams, and the spaces within the dacha's walls created sites for relations and recreations distinct from city life; leisure, consumption, and feminized space became the hallmarks-cliches even-of dacha life. Revolution marked a break in dacha history, but continuities were evident too. The old dachniki became victims of class war during the Revolution and Civil War. In the early years of Soviet power many settlements degenerated into shanty towns; given the desperate housing shortage dachniki were, more often than not, little more than suburban squatters who had lost out in the struggle to get a town apartment. Soon, however, themore comfortable buildings in the prime locations around Moscow and Leningrad were made available to favoured members of the regime: power and privi lege reasserted itself in terms of access to scarce resources, a process which gathered pace as the Stalin regime stabilized in the 'Great Retreat' of the mid-I 930s and the new vydvizhentsyi aspired to 'chintz and lace-curtain respectability'. Thereafter, as Lovell shows, dachas became an established part of life for the nomenklatura and, in the post-war years, the locus of a distinct intelligentsia subculture. The book con cludes with a short section on the post-Soviet context and the swamping of previous 'dacha cultures' by new social cohorts and new architectural styles. A small point: in the conclusion the author worries about how to characterize the classic dacha's social constituency. He identifies this constituency as 'urban nonproletarians'-an aspect of Russia's failed middle class-but finds ithard to locate any common identity within the group save their 'exurban habit' (p. 236). But the problem, it seems tome, can easily be solved. The people he is discussing are those who, in eighteenth-century Britain, would have been called the 'middling orders' and in the nineteenth century, perhaps more accurately, the professional middle classes. Harold Perkin delineated them in his seminal works The Origins ofModern Eng lish Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, I969) and The Rise of Professional Society (London: Macmillan, I989). As Lovell hints in the Introduction (pp. 2 4), dachniki comprised exactly that salaried group of professionals and hirelings doctors, lawyers, artists and designers, teachers, writers, engineers, and specialists of all kinds-characteristic of modernizing societies everywhere, but especially in coun tries, like Russia, where the state has played such a crucial role in determining the pace, scale, and direction of economic and social change. Summerfolk is a fascinating study, intelligently conceived and full of surprises and interesting byways. It is a joy to read, and will be of interest to specialists and non specialists alike. ROBINSONCOLLEGE,CAMBRIDGE CHRISTOPHER WARD Bakhtin: Ethics and Mechanics. Ed. by VALERIEZ. NOLLAN. Evanston, IL: North western University Press. 2004. xxxiii+95 pp. $79.95 (pbk $27.95). ISBN o 8IOI-I67I-5 (pbko-8IOI-I515-8). This slim volume consists of four essays and an extended introduction. Each es say, taken by itself, is of interest. Most contribute something to our understanding or evaluation of Bakhtin's own work aswell as to the texts towhich this is applied. David Krasner's 'Dialogics and Dialectics: Bakhtin, Young Hegelians, and Dramatic The ory' usefully draws a distinction between dialectics in the conception of Hegel himself (with its emphasis on synthesis) and that of the Young Hegelians (emphasizing the conflict of irreconcilable opposites), before exploring what Bakhtin holds in common with the latter (their rejection of transcendental aesthetics), and where his dialogics differs from their dialectics (polyphony rather than necessary conflict). Two plays by MLR, IOI .4, 2oo6 I I95 contemporary black writers are then read as paradigm texts forYoung Hegelian and Bakhtinian aesthetics. Jacqueline Zubeck's 'Bakhtin's Ethics and an Iconographic Standard in Crime and Punishment' interprets Dostoevsky's hero Raskolnikov as the embodiment of the unethical subject of Bakhtin's Towards- a Philosophy of theAct, one whose theoreticized world-view prevents him from accepting answerability for his actions on the basis of his 'non-alibi inBeing'. In a perhaps insufficiently motivated manceuvre, Zubeck goes on to apply the theology and semiotics of the icon toDosto evsky's text...

'Authority is everything': A study of the politics of textual ownership

The relationships between text, knowledge and power in the construction of writer identities have been the source of much debate among philosophers,literary scholars and language educators (e.g., Bakhtin 1981; Kristeva 1986;
 Pennycook 2001). Such interrelationships are played out in the transcultural encounters that occur between students and their lecturers on a daily basis in our contemporary university classrooms. This article explores how two
 undergraduate students from different language backgrounds, studying at a major Australian university, struggle to deal with the politics of text/knowledge construction in their quest for a sense of ownership and authorial control over the assignments they produce. Data consisting of interviews and assignments by students from different disciplinary fields have been selected from a larger study into plagiarism and intertextuality. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin (1981),
 Kristeva (1986) and Howard (1992; 1995; 1999), my analysis indicates firstly, that students feel constrained by the homogenising (Holton 2000) forces of the academic writing conventions that they feel obliged to imitate; and secondly,
 confused by unified and autonomous concepts of authorship and originality that fail to take account of the 'shared' nature of the processes of text/knowledge production. I conclude by suggesting that the development of writer identity needs to be seen as part of the ongoing epistemological negotiations that occur between students and lecturers as they struggle to construct desired meanings across texts. I then consider the implications of these findings for academic writing pedagogy.

FAMILY THERAPY AS A DIALOGUE OF LIVING PERSONS: A PERSPECTIVE INSPIRED BY BAKHTIN, VOLOSHINOV, AND SHOTTER

There are not a lot of conceptual tools that can help a family therapy teacher to talk and teach about the importance of the therapeutic relationship in family therapy practice. The idea that family therapy can be conceived as a dialogue might offer a fresh and promising perspective. Mainly inspired by the work of Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Shotter, the author considers if the concept of dialogue can help us to talk about something that is there all the time in our family therapeutic practices, although sometimes unnoticed, and that is hard to talk about because we lack the necessary conceptual tools. When we choose to conceptualize family therapy as dialogue, the focus of the therapist is not primarily on data collection, information processing or problem analysis. The therapist is not primarily concerned with knowing, or with not-knowing. Instead, the focus is on the idea that first and foremost therapy is a meeting of living persons, searching to find ways to share life together for a while. Clinical vignettes that feature children's drawings in family therapy are used as illustrations.

On Literature and Ethics

This essay deals with the complex relationship between literature and ethics. More specifically, it inquires into and problematizes the conceptual ways in which such discursive distinctions as that between literature and moral philosophy have been upheld, as well as the assumptions and presuppositions underlying the ascription to literature of an ethically exemplary role. Accepting the methodological and conceptual challenges presented by some of the major philosophical and theoretical positions informing literature's perception as ethically exemplary (from Aristotle to Jakobson and Derrida), this essay suggests a new theoretical framework for thinking about the enmeshment of literature and ethics, drawing especially on the works of Bakhtin and MacIntyre.

Interactive or dialogic teaching? The case of the ‘inspirational’ teacher

This paper explores some classroom approaches that student teachers on a Postgraduate Certificate in Education course tend to associate with inspirational teaching in English, and contrasts these with the direct interactive teaching recently advocated by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education and National Curriculum authorities for developing literacy. Interactive teaching can provide useful models of the strategies that mature readers use with different texts, and it can be encouraged in beginning teachers. Yet, inspirational teaching seems to offer more than this, and in less predictable ways than normal classroom competence. The dialogism and ‘answerabil‐ity’ that are central to the work of Bakhtin offer one way of exploring the relationship between self and other, and between subject as developing person and subject as sanctioned curriculum content, that may be operating in classrooms where pupils find themselves inspired to learn.

Toward a Dialogical Perspective on Agency

The aim of this article is to motivate and outline a dialogical perspective on agency that accommodates centrifugal and centripetal tendencies in current cultural theories of agency. To complement approaches that assume a high degree of integration and clarity, we emphasise the diversity of agency as it is experienced in the open‐ended dialogical relationship with a particular other. While these former approaches to agency provide us with the means to examine the influence of social processes such as division of labour and reproduction of community, they tend to underplay the importance of agency as it is embodied and experienced in the lives of particular people. To reflect on this aspect of agency, we will draw extensively on Bakhtin's work, which crosses boundaries between philosophy, psychology and literary criticism, and which is concerned to understand what is personal in activity. In terms of agency, his work draws our attention to the sense of responsibility and potentiality that imbues our dialogues with particular others, the aesthetics and ethics involved in dialoguing with the other, and the sense of dilemmatic choice and intonation that is involved in our dialogue with the other.

Developing Contradictions: Women's Participation as a Site of Struggle Within an Indian NGO*

Women are being hired in increasing numbers by development projects to facilitate women's participation components. Once employed, however, women often find themselves marginalized within their organizations. In this paper, I find that the women's participation component of an Indian drinking water project has enabled the exclusion of women fieldworkers employed by the project. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, I show participatory approaches as multiple, partial, and contentious. Moves to thwart women fieldworkers and women's participation give rise to struggles over development geography. Analysis of project records, interviews with staff, and observation of staff activities provide evidence for results.

Cognitive processes in text interpretation: Rereading Bakhtin

This article shows how the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin anticipated many of the concepts relating to texts that have been advanced in cognitive science in recent decades. For example, Bakhtin's emphasis on schemas of actions and events, space and time, is remarkably commensurate with recent approaches in semantics and discourse theory. But there is another dimension to Bakhtin that makes his work all the more valuable: the way in which textual elements of genre and linguistic code are grounded in history. I argue on this basis that genre (and the various conventions associated with it), has important epistemological dimensions. Here I bring Bakhtin's work into dialogue with the more recent discourse processing theory of Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch, to draw out more explicitly the implications for text interpretation that his work contains.

The Master and The Slave: Lukacs, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (review)

Reviewed by: The Master and The Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time Paul J. Contino The Master and The Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time. By Galin Tihanov. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xiii + 327pp. $85.00. Galin Tihanov has written a splendidly researched and immensely informed intellectual history of two of the twentieth century's major theorists of the novel. His focus, as he explains early in his book, is "not Lukács as such, but the Lukács who emerges when placed next to Bakhtin; not Bakhtin on his own, but rather the Bakhtin who becomes visible only in the light of Lukács" (11). Tihanov has warrant for this focus: Although Lukács did not know the work of Bakhtin, Bakhtin knew Theory of the Novel and fourteen articles written by Lukács between 1935-38. Tihanov's metaphoric title is drawn from Hegel, and suggests Tihanov's view of Bakhtin's embrace of Lukács as "master," as well as his "efforts to emancipate himself from Lukács' often officially sanctioned thought and [. . . to bring] to the fore the originality of his own ideas despite the inclemency of the social climate and his personal life" (15). Tihanov draws upon post-structuralist readings of Hegel to suggest the fluidity and reversals in the master-slave relationship — after all, in the last twenty years, Bakhtin's critical stock has risen while Lukács' has fallen. Tihanov would like to see renewed attention to Lukács: his title suggests his deep appreciation of Hegel and the Marxist thinkers who followed him, and his oft-expressed preference for criticism with an historical and social viewpoint. Given this preference, the ethical, phenomenological, and personalist dimensions of Bakhtin's work are often criticized as "domesticating" (215), "utopian" (238), and "reductionist" (286). Despite the limitations of this focus, each chapter of Tihanov's thoughtful book offers valuable insights into both of these vital thinkers. The first three chapters focus upon the early writings of both thinkers, and the overarching concepts important to each. The first of these is "culture." Tihanov ably and knowledgably demonstrates the way both Lukács [End Page 276] and Bakhtin draw from a neo-Kantian and Hegelian "philosophy of life" tradition which sees in art a rendering of the totality and essence of life as opposed to the monstrously reifying "expert" or the blinkered aesthete (27-28). In 1918—the year in which Lukács' German academic career was foiled and he joined the Hungarian Communist Party (183-84)—Lukács decisively broke and "de-personalized" [. . .] "the link between aesthetics and ethics" (30-31). From Tihanov's perspective, this is all to the good, as he makes clear when he critiques both thinkers for their early writings on "form": "[Their] discourses on life and form meet only on the ground of ethics which proves, however, insufficient for their thorough and organic interpenetration." Their early ethical emphasis "impedes the study of literature in the unity of its social and artistic dimensions" and remains "impervious to the historical dynamics of art" (47-48). Tihanov sees the concept of "genre" as assisting both theorists out of this impasse. Lukács' "central juxtaposition of epic and novel" (51) influences Bakhtin, but Bakhtin's understanding of genre proves richer. Here Bakhtinappears to be the master as he posits that "Genres no longer reflect the world, [but] rather [. . .] represent and model it. This idea of the active nature of literary genre is based on a new understanding of language [in which . . . W]e only come to know the world by articulating it, and the the words we use to do so are not entirely our own" (59). When Tihanov turns to the concepts of "reification and dialogue," he attends especially to Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1923) and Bakhtin's writings from the late 1920's into the mid 1930's. For Lukács, the foe of the proletariat is the ubiquitous presence of reification—the reduction of a person or interpersonal relations to the status of a thing—an idea which, as Tihanov ably shows, he inherits and develops from a plethora of sources...

The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics by Craig Brandist (review)

MLR, 99.1, 2004 271 The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics. By Craig Brandist. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. 2002. x + 221 pp. ?45 (pbk ?15.99). ISBN o74531 -811-8 (pbk 0-74531-810-x). Craig Brandist's challenging book might be seen as another successful attempt at materializing Mikhail Bakhtin. One of the most extraordinary thinkers of the twenti? eth century, Bakhtin, nevertheless, was hardly the 'original monumental genius' (p. 3) presented in the 1980s. Although in recent research attitudes to Bakhtin have changed significantly,the problem of the Circle's intellectual context and the original sources of many of its ideas still remains. Fluid terminology, a heavy load of philosophical connotations, the notorious absence of references in Bakhtin's writings, as well as the complex matters of disputed authorship and seriously flawed translations, have all obscured the points of contact between the work of the Circle and Western mainstream philosophy. In investigating some of the fouhdations of the Circle's ideas, Brandist offersan insightful journey into the European philosophy of the early twentieth cen? tury. He interprets the work of the Bakhtin Circle thinkers as a 'particular ongoing synthesis of mainly German philosophical currents in peculiarly Soviet contexts' (p. 5). The philosophical traditions with which the Circle engaged were the NeoKantianism of the Marburg School, Lebensphilosophie, and Georg Simmel's account of the relationship between life and culture, Phenomenology, and Gestalt theory. In the 1930s Hegelian influences began to appear in Bakhtin's work, either directly or by way of Nikolai Marr's theory of language, whose impact on Bakhtin and Voloshinov, as Brandist asserts, was much stronger and more lasting than is usually recognized. Among other unavoidable peculiarities of the Soviet context is the fact that, under the conditions of tight censorship, aesthetic concepts in the Circle's work came to be endowed with ethical and even socio-political meanings, while socio-political terms acquired broader philosophical implications. In the firsthalf of the 1920s the Circle developed an aesthetic and ethical philosophy, which drew heavily on Neo-Kantian sources and examined the borders between aesthetics and ethics as realms of art and life. Bakhtin followed Franz Brentano in making the intentional act the centre of his ethical theory and understood responsibility as a bridge between life and culture. Drawing on Simmel's and Max Scheler's sociology, Bakhtin introduced the essen? tial concept of intersubjectivity, which would become central for Pavel Medvedev's literary theory, Valentin Voloshinov's philosophy of language, and Bakhtin's own theory of the novel. Analysing in this way the works of the Circle and its other major philosophical concepts, Brandist invariably traces their original German sources, thus providing a secure European intellectual context even forthe trademarks of Bakhtin's theory,such as chronotope and carnival. By the end of the book it becomes clear that, although rethought and reinterpreted, the same philosophical foundations remained influential throughout Bakhtin's career and recur in his late works, partly perhaps due to the scholar's lifelong isolation. This is one of the conclusions of the book, which in Brandist's opinion can be seen as another critical adjustment to the 'protective belt' of the Bakhtin theory that has already been subject to a number of serious refutations. To protect its 'hard core' and make its positive heuristic workable forfuture research, Brandist offersalternative social and political applications ofthe Circle's legacy, which are particularly consistent with Voloshinov's ideas. The reader, however, is left with a feeling that, in the wake of this hugely informative and uncompromising book, the 'hard core' itself of Bakhtin's theory is ripe for serious reconsideration. University of Exeter Vladislava Reznik ...