Dostoevsky's Poetics Research Articles

Three Stories and Polyphonic Structure——The Master and Margarita in a Polyphonic Perspective

Adopting the characteristics of polyphonic novels proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, this paper analyzes the polyphonic structure in the three stories and the interweaving of multiple characters’ perspectives to discuss the author's critique of human cowardice. Mikhail Bulgakov created a rich cast of characters and used dialogues and debates to show differences and contradictions, thus demonstrating the carnivalesque nature of the text. With an attempt to provide his answer through the novel, he hoped that people could get rid of limitations and pursue truth and freedom.

Ф. М. Достоевский и Ж.-Л. Марион: память в свете понятия conversio

This article attempts to apply the concepts of “conversion” and “memoria” to Dostoevsky's poetics and, in particular, to his use of the “sudden memory” technique. These concepts are adopted from the analysis of the “Confession” of St. Augustine, conducted by the Catholic theologian and phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion. It is revealed that Augustine's “conversion” should be understood in two senses: institutionally, as an entry into the Church, and phenomenologically, as a turn to the Church. It is indicated that the first meaning presupposes rootedness in tradition and psychological integrity, while the second meaning presupposes psychological duality and the experience of loss of identity. It is the phenomenological meaning that is relevant for Dostoevsky's prose: the author substantiates that it was conceptualized by Bakhtin in the concept of a “threshold situation”. In view of this, the use of phenomenological methods to clarify the path of remembrance in Dostoevsky's works is argued. With the involvement of historical-literary works and the use of philosophical methods, the key concept of Dostoevsky's poetics “suddenly” is analyzed. It is proved, firstly, that the obsessive break in the narrative, which is designated by the writer by the specified concept of “suddenly”, precedes the transformation of the personality of the characters, the “change of mind” they experience; secondly, that although the “threshold situation” and the possibility of “change of mind” are available to every hero of Dostoevsky, not all of them come to the possibility of genuine conversion, that is, to entering the Church. The author comes to the conclusion that the gap between the two stages of “conversion” is due to 1) the tradition in which this or that hero exists and 2) his own capabilities of remembrance.

Dostoevsky's Poetics of Modern Freedom: Against Bakhtin's "Polyphonic" Moral Truth

In an influential treatise, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) asserts that the aim of Dostoevsky's distinctive poetics is to advance a revolutionary, polyphonic model of moral truth. In this paper, I argue that while Bakhtin correctly identifies essential features of Dostoevsky's poetics, these features are better understood as oriented toward meeting the free modern individual's need to test ultimate moral ends and concomitant virtues in order to determine their truth. An Aristotelian poetics intended to educate audiences only in how to be virtuous to achieve moral ends that are given by tradition will have different essential features than will a modern poetics whose purpose is to help individuals determine what the virtues are . It is this latter purpose, I argue, that drives Dostoevsky to create the new stylistic devices that Bakhtin observes in Dostoevsky's work, rather than the purpose of realizing a philosophically problematic polyphonic model of moral truth.

“Chizhiki tak i mrut”

My article will investigate the ways in which metaphors for birds, especially birds of song, in the correspondence between the protagonists of Dostoevsky's novel “Poor Folk” (Бедные люди, 1846) — Makar Devushkin and Varen'ka Dobroselova — refer back to Goethe's scandalously popular epistolary novel “The Sufferings of Young Werther” (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774). I propose that Dostoevsky involves a metaphoric net as an oblique subtext of references to recent popular European literature to convey the idea of Romantic death (bearing in mind the extent to which “Werther”, though written in the late eighteenth century, retained its cultural relevance for Russian readers in Dostoevsky's time). As I am investigating the larger picture of Dostoevsky's treatment of death and suicide in his shorter fiction as well as his dialogue with Goethe on this subject, I also argue that in “Poor Folk” the parody and stylization of Romantic discourse in Rataziaev's texts (and elsewhere) reveals thematic parallels between the Russian and the German narratives, and demonstrates Dostoevsky's viewpoint on death, Romanticism and Realism. For the methodological basis of my study, I will apply Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas on parody and stylization from his seminal “Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics” (especially from the chapter “Dostoevsky's Discourse”.

Dostoevsky's Poetics of Modern Freedom: Against Bakhtin's "Polyphonic" Moral Truth

In an influential treatise, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) asserts that the aim of Dostoevsky's distinctive poetics is to advance a revolutionary, "polyphonic" model of moral truth. In this paper, I argue that while Bakhtin correctly identifies essential features of Dostoevsky's poetics, these features are better understood as oriented toward meeting the free modern individual's need to test ultimate moral ends and concomitant virtues in order to determine their truth. An Aristotelian poetics intended to educate audiences only in how to be virtuous to achieve moral ends that are given by tradition will have different essential features than will a modern poetics whose purpose is to help individuals determine what the virtues are. It is this latter purpose, I argue, that drives Dostoevsky to create the new stylistic devices that Bakhtin observes in Dostoevsky's work, rather than the purpose of realizing a philosophically problematic "polyphonic" model of moral truth.

Psychoanalysts of the first quarter of the 20th century about “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The article examines the judgements of representatives of psychoanalysis of the early 20th century on the life and work of Fyodor Dostoevsky and, in particular, his novel "Crime and Punishment". The works of such famous psychoanalysts and followers of psychoanalysis as Alfred Adler. Jolan Neufeld, Sigmund Freud and Erich Seligmann Fromm are analysed. In the article "Dostoevsky" Adler, noting the contradictory nature of the characters, points to the general direction of movement for them towards finding inner peace, which, in turn, reveals a similarity with the nature of the writer himself. The researcher's particular attention is drawn to the theme of the boundaries of what is permitted and what is not permitted in Dostoevsky's work. Neufeld in his work "Dostoevsky" indicates that the basis of artistic depiction in the work of Dostoevsky is the emotional experience of the writer himself, whose personality makeup the psychoanalyst assesses as hysterical, which, in turn, turns out to be characteristic of his heroes. The researcher also notes the writer's increased attention to the category of the unconscious and highlights a number of features characteristic of Dostoevsky's poetics. In the well-known work of Freud "Dostoevsky and Parricide", the influence of "unconscious impulses" in the work of the Russian classic on the structure and peculiarities of plot lines in his works is indicated. The founder of neopsychoanalysis, Fromm, also draws attention to the category of the unconscious, but he is more inclined to interpret the behaviour of the heroes taking into account social and worldview factors. On the whole, the considered studies of psychoanalysts laid the foundations for a close study of the features of psychologism in Dostoevsky's work.

The Mirroring Phenomenon in Cultural Consciousness of Russia

The article considers the understanding of the phenomenon of mirroring. In particular, the specifics of the mirroring phenomenon interpretation in scientific studies is analyzed with the help of the comparative historical method and the integral method of literary work analysis. Mirroring is considered as a philosophical and aesthetic phenomenon, as well as a category of modern cultural studies, semiotics and literary studies. The paper in question follows the history of mirror not as a materialistic object, but rather as the phenomenon which meaning goes beyond “physical” nature; it is traced what meanings mirroring acquires in different epochs in the European and Russian culture – from ancient times (the folklore understanding of a mirror as a boundary between worlds) to modern interpretations. It is mentioned in the work that the mirror was not only a common household item, but also a symbolic object that accompanies an individual’s search for himself in the process of self-understanding since one’s own reflection can reveal similarities or differences, kinship or alienity within oneself. The article examines the interpretation of the phenomenon of mirroring in the humanitarian thought of the twentieth century, primarily in the research of M. M. Bakhtin. The entire corpus of the most important scientific works of M. M. Bakhtin has been analyzed: “Author and hero in aesthetic activity”, “Man at the mirror”, “Problems of Dostoevsky's creativity”, “Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics” etc. It is found that the phenomenon of mirroring in the works of M. M. Bakhtin is directly associated with the categories of the “other”, “out-of-search”, “double”, which are dominant in the dialogical concept of the scientist (the other as an “I-twin” turns “others” into objects of his own vision with the help of the mirror). The mirror appears as the object of a character’s identification with his own reflection, himself, and is connected with the conception of “strange consciousness” as a means of “internal” self-equality on looking at yourself with “other’s” eyes.

The Carnivalesque in Illness: Hollis Seamon's Somebody Up There Hates You.

This article analyzes Hollis Seamon's Somebody Up There Hates You in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque as it is developed both in Rabelais and His World and in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. The novel shows the power of carnivalesque episodes and ironic laughter to question both the conventional approach to illness and death, and to illness literature in general. However, it also exposes the limits of parody and laughter in the face of death-no matter how regenerating this carnivalesque novel may prove to be for literature as a whole.

“Husband under the Bed”: Specular Enclosures, Cuckoldry, and Logorrhea in Dostoevsky's Early Works

This article seeks to demonstrate how Dostoevsky processes the devices vaudeville, folk theater, and particularly the cuckold play into his own unique, genre‐bending art form. By focusing on his overlooked 1848 half‐vaudeville, half‐feuilleton “The Other Man's Wife and the Husband under the Bed,” and placing it in the context of his other works, I explore the influence of the cuckold play on Dostoevsky's tendency to privilege two‐in‐one scenarios, such as doubling, and sometimes the literal enclosure of two men in one tight space. I argue that the main concern that emerges from Dostoevsky's theatrical influences is the relationship between discourse and space. Specifically, in contrast to Bakhtin's focus on “thresholds” as the paradigmatic loci of Dostoevsky's poetics, I point out the way that spatial and specular enclosures originate excessive, logorrheic discourse and the dialogization, or doubling of the characters' inner monologues.

Talent and Force: A Bakhtinian Reading of “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder

What challenges and imports do Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogics-the belief that a novel should be polyphonic and resist a closed view of meaning presented through a single voice-carry for an increasingly globalized world? How could/should contemporary writers respond these challenges? These questions are particularly relevant for literary nonfiction and travel writers who are concerned with not reducing a people or place a single authorial perspective, especially one from the outside. Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Kidder provides an example of a polyphonic work in his book Mountains Beyond Mountains, which follows the life and career of physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer. Kidder renders Farmer's life by showing scenes of Farmer with his patients, using exposition describe Farmer's relationships with his family and friends, summarizing his academic and intellectual life, employing dialogue show his unique idiosyncrasies, and using himself, the writer, as an antihero. His approach of including multiple voices, of which his is just one among many, is an important example for how an author can to an extraordinary extent broaden, deepen and rearrange this consciousness... in order accommodate the consciousness of others and hence provide a paradigm for global writers come (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 59).

Creative learning conversations: producing living dialogic spaces

Background: ‘Creative learning conversations’, are methodological devices developed in two co-participative qualitative research projects exploring creativity and educational futures at the University of Exeter in England. Sources of evidence: Framed by Critical Theory, the projects, one on dance education partnership, the other on student voice and transformation, sought to open space between creativity and performativity to initiate emancipatory educational change. This was undertaken over the course of five years in English primary and secondary schools, prioritising humanising, wise creativity. Purpose: This paper re-analyses data and methodological processes to characterise and theorise creative learning conversations in terms of social spatiality and dialogue. The characteristics are: partiality, emancipation, working from the ‘bottom up’, participation, debate and difference, openness to action, and embodied and verbalised idea exchange. Main argument: This re-analysis theoretically adapts Bronfenbrenner's ecological model (The ecology of human development; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) to situate layered engagement. Utilising Lefebvre's conceptualisation of lived space (The production of space; Wiley-Blackwell, 1991) and Bakhtin's work (Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics; ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson; Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press, 1984) on open-ended dialogue, the paper theorises creative learning conversations as producing living dialogic spaces. Conclusions: Creative learning conversations are a way of contributing to change, which moves us towards an education future fit for the twenty-first century. From a living dialogic space perspective, a creative learning conversation is the ongoing process without forced closure of those in the roles of university academic, teachers, artists, students co-participatively researching and developing knowledge of their ‘lived space’ together. Given traditional lethargy in the educational system as a whole commitment to changing education for better futures demands active involvement in living dialogic space, where our humanity both emerges from and guides our shared learning.

Dostoevsky and the Novel-Tragedy: Genre and Modernity in Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin

The early-twentieth-century Russian debate on the place of tragedy in Dostoevsky's novels included interventions by the leading figure of the symbolist movement in Russia, Vyacheslav Ivanov; by the philosophically minded literary historian Lev Pumpyansky; and by the author of the most formidable analysis of Dostoevsky's poetics to date, Mikhail Bakhtin. From the perspective of a certain widespread vision of modernity, the project of thinking the modern novel and tragedy together is paradoxical. It is thus noteworthy that such a project seemed urgent to major Russian intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s and that it frequently relied on the articulation of an implicitly exceptionalist narrative about Russian modernity and its proper forms. Additionally, staging the three-way debate among Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin allows us to see that Bakhtin's reading of Dostoevsky as a modern novelist par excellence is conceptually tied to the largely occluded theory of the tragic.

О сакральном в художественном времени Достоевского

The article is devoted to the analysis of the action time in Dostoevsky's works. The motives of painful and ecstatic love to the world and universe, suffering and cruel voluptuousness are especially important in the plots of his works. An antipositivism dialogue is revealed, i.e. disillusionment of "semi scientific" credo which is suicidal for the humankind from the point of view of the author. The time in F.M. Dostoevsky's poetics is a form and measure for the movement of the eternity in the space of the created world.

Crime is in the Eye of the Beholder: Petr Petrovich Luzhin as a Distorting “Puddle-Mirror” in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

AbstractThis study demonstrates how conceptualizations ingrained in our linguistic consciousness help us realize the full semantics that an author com municates to his reader through a “speaking name”; this kind of name, together with the character's behavioral profile create a multidimensional psychological portrait.The examples are taken from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, specifically the “puddle-name” Luzhin. The speaking name of Petr Petrovich Luzhin evokes a number of cognitive conceptualizations that are rooted in human experience, as well as in the history, mythology, and culture of the Russian people and that are in dialogical relationships with the other characters in the novel through their speaking names. The analysis, based on cognitive stylistics and, more specifically, cognitive metaphor theory in the Lakoff tradition, underscores the significance of the cultural water metaphor when applied to the human domain. It also confirms that the “speaking name” is a major device in Dostoevsky's poetics.

Jan van der Heyden's urban prose*

Jan van der Heyden's urban prose*

“The Surge and Pelt of Daily Life”: Rediscovery of the Prosaic in Don DeLillo's The Names

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See David Remnick 42–48; Philip Nel, 736–59. During a recent interview conducted by New York Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati, DeLillo was asked by a woman in the audience the old “Are you a postmodern writer?” question. He quipped that postmodernism was already over, wasn't it? He then noted that he thought of himself more as a modernist. In novels like Dostoevsky's The Devils or Gide's Les Caves du Vatican (trans. as Lafcadio's Adventures), intellectual types wrack their brains to create an action that has no human rhyme or reason, but can never fulfill that necessarily theoretical position, discovering for themselves the moral implications of their detachment. I discuss this idea in my doctoral dissertation, Murder in the Name of Theory: Theoretical Pardigms and Ethical Problems in Works by Dostoevsky, Gide and DeLillo, Rutgers University, 1998. James is complacent. In Dante's Inferno (Canto III), those unwilling to take a moral risk do not even make it into hell because the distinction of a particular vice would show too much individuality. The complacent sit on the doorstep of hell, “neither hot nor cold,” and hell, too, “spews” them out of its mouth (Revelation 3:15–16). To not use one's talents or manifest one's being is a deadly sin, an issue that James makes manifest in the novel. Mark Osteen notes that James is “protecting his psychic investment with sartorial ones” (130). Osteen uses this particular word to invoke “language” as an expression of “filial and communal bonds,” perfect because its very articulation evokes the associations by contiguity which touch one's muscle memory and establish the body's own cellular links to language (118). Murray Jay Siskind, in White Noise, also demonstrates an academic distance from prosaic experience as he discusses plots and murder with Jack Gladney: “‘Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up’” (290). Siskind similarly explains his ideas as an exercise in abstraction. “This is theory. We're a couple of academics taking a walk” (291). But Gladney becomes increasingly intrigued and finally executes Murray's “theory.” Like Raskolnikov in the Dostoevsky novel, Jack acts upon the impulses that he imagines will give him immortality, but his crime and punishment derive from the dangerous fantasy that intellectual formulations can be readily divorced from their impact on mentality and behavior. “Monologism” is a Bakhtinian term that has lost most of its whallop in hackneyed academic use. Once, the term had between-the-lines resonance with regard to the Soviet authority, whose stranglehold on discourse and dialogue—secret police and internal spies abounding—could not be discussed explicitly. Like “finalization” or “fatal theoretism,” “monologia” has a frightening literal connotation which belies today's innocuous usage. Osteen reminds us that the names in The Names are significant (122). David Cowart notes that “DeLillo takes the cult's implicit nihilism fully into account—and gives it the lie by deconstructing the mock-pentecostal question the cultists like to ask: how many languages do you speak? In effect he counters their question with a counter-question: `How many language-games do you play?’” (167). This quotation provides the chapter title for Douglas Keesey's discussion of The Names. Caryl Emerson, Bakhtin's most insightful translator and explicator, argues that “for Bakhtin, to translate was never to betray; on the contrary, translation, broadly conceived, was for him the essence of all human communication. Crossing language boundaries was perhaps the most fundamental of human acts” (Editor's Preface to Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984, xxxi). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJacqueline A. ZubeckJacqueline Zubeck is a Visiting Professor at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, New York. Her scholarly interests include Don DeLillo, war literature, Dostoevsky, and Eastern Orthodox Christian culture. She recently spent a fruitful month in Milledgeville, Georgia, studying Flannery O'Connor at an NEH Summer Institute and will continue to pursue this southern writer's work.

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.

Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts

Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts ]ohn Docker Subhash ]aireth These essays arose from an international symposium "Adventures of Dialogue : Bakhtin and Benjamin" staged at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, in June 2001. We formed the idea to hold a conference, as the twentieth century ended and the new millennium ushered itself in, on two of modernity's greatest literary and philosophical thinkers, who were born almost at the same time, and in the late 1920s published two of the last century's most challenging, brilliant, speculative works, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. We decided to call on the term "Adventures" because, as with "Adventures of Identity: Constructing the Multicultural Subject," a conference organized by John Docker and Gerhard Fischer at the Goethe-Institut in Sydney in 1998, such a title and approach seems to elicit imaginative and adventurous contributions. As with the Goethe-Institut conference, we would aim to include topics and participants from around the world. The "Eurocentric," we hoped, would be thoroughly challenged in our Canberra conference, as it had been in Sydney. In July of 2000 we sent out a call for papers, suggesting a wide range JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.3 (Fall 2002): 261-265. Copyright O 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 262 JNT of possible symposium themes—from "Being and Becoming" to "Philosophy and Representation"; from "Vision and Visuality" to "Space, Place, Travel" and "Time"; from "Objects and Things" to "Monotheism and Polytheism." Each of these rubrics implied a diverse subset of possibilities including the individuality of cities; the public sphere; places sacred, uncanny and mystical—pilgrimages, shrines, temples, synagogues, mosques, churches; sea, ships, ship decks and voyages; museums; railway stations; war/peace memorials; absence of memorials; massacre sites; genocide and trauma; inns, taverns, pubs, salons, the tea shop, the coffee shop; geocultural areas—"the Levant," "the Mediterranean," "Africa," "Asia," "the Pacific ," "Europe"; the prison in history; education; cosmopolitanism; postsecularism ; Egyptology; Exodus; the Bible and critical theory; settler-colonialism and religion; Freud's Moses and Monotheism; heresy; the sacred and the ludic; creation stories, etc. In our call for papers we wrote that we "see the symposium as staging intimate multiple conversations between Bakhtin and Benjamin's ideas and theories," and that we would "particularly like offers of papers that entwine discussion of both thinkers, in terms of possible affinities and differences, in a spirit of agonistic respect." We also sought out and encouraged paper givers for the conference outside of Europe and "the West," and were also very interested in papers that might engage with indigenous cultures. We were attracted to ideas for papers that surprised us and that we thought were truly "adventurous"—that might proceed from Bakhtin or Benjamin and explore new areas or motifs or texts or figures, often in almost eccentric or idiosyncratic ways. We hoped such papers would stretch the boundaries, taking Benjamin and Bakhtin away from canonical enclosed treatment of them that we thought was, if not boring, at least restrictive and predictable. In conceiving the symposium, we recognized that Bakhtin remains closely tied to the two sites of Slavic and Literary studies, whereas Benjamin has "traveled" far and wide. One of our aims was to encourage an investigation of Bakhtin and a dialogue with Benjamin that would address the question of influence. Theorists came in from the US, Scotland, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as the Australian cities of Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra itself. Proceedings were entertainingly visual, with much showing of slides, movie excerpts, photos, postcards. The high intellectual Introduction-. Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts 263 quality was set at the beginning of each day by the keynote speakers Katerina Clark and Rajeev Patke. These were our noble bookends, investigating and extending current knowledge and research into our major figures. Then younger scholars took over, glancing off Bakhtin and Benjamin to give witty, unusual, innovative talks. The well known cultural theorist and public intellectual Meaghan Morris arrestingly summed up proceedings at the end. There were no parallel sessions, so rapport and camaraderie easily developed over the two days. There was much fun and laughter. There...

Appropriating a Slur

Appropriating a Slur

Revisiting the Southern Grotesque: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Case of Carson McCullers

form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art from is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, `I seem strange to you, anyway I am alive.' -- Carson McCullers, The Vision Shared Writers of the or gothic(1)--for example, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Flannery O'Connor--conjure up the strange worlds of freakish outsiders placed in lovelorn barren landscapes, penetrating heat, and closed spaces, with themes of miscegenation, sexual deviance and bloody violence. Perhaps not surprisingly, critical readers have, on the whole, concurred that the southern grotesque aligns itself with a gloomy vision of modernity, according to which the soul of man is both aimless and loveless. grotesque worlds of southern literature, it is argued, allegorize the human condition itself as existential alienation and angst. In my view, however, these accounts of the southern grotesque do not tally with the type of art which McCullers describes in the prefatory quotation above, as well as in other essays (for example, The Russian Realists and Southern Literature and The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing) and the fiction itself. McCullers, like O'Connor in Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction, accentuates the vitality of the grotesque vision. Without wanting to dismiss the real pain that is so often at the heart of the southern grotesque, including McCullers' writings, I want to suggest that the grotesque is not limited to an alienating modernity. Rather, it is to do with the affirming qualities and practices of growth, promise and transformation. What I am advocating, then, is a crucial need to revisit the grotesque. In doing so in this essay, I note different theories of the grotesque, and find Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of it the most fruitful not only for describing the dynamics of McCullers' grotesque subjects, also for promising a radically new construction of how we read the southern grotesque.(2) I then perform a reading of McCullers' novels of adolescence--The Heart of the Lonely Hunter (1940) and Member of the Wedding (1946)--as an example of how we might reframe what I suggest are limited readings of the southern grotesque. Julia Kristeva first brought Bakhtin to the attention of western scholars with her 1969 essay, Word, Dialogue and Novel. With the translation into English of Rabelais and His World in 1968, and Dialogic Imagination and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics in the early 1980s, Bakhtin became a key name in literary studies, particularly in response to his theory of the novel. Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin's reading of Gargantua and Pantagruel, contains a revolutionary conceptualization of the grotesque that I suggest can free not just McCullers' fiction much southern writing from the almost paralyzing burden of more traditional accounts of the grotesque, to celebrate, instead, McCullers' pronouncement, but anyway I am alive. As I have noted, most readers of the southern grotesque submit that it allegorizes a kind of existential anguish. William Van O'Connor accounts for the grotesque in southern writing as a response to a world of violence and upheaval; Joseph Millichap makes a connection between the grotesque and a dark modernism; and Leslie Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), links the grotesque with terror and violence. More specifically, McCullers' worlds are said to represent alienation, loneliness, a lack of human communication, and the failure of love.(3) Although there is no denying the validity of these constructions of the southern grotesque, I do not think they tell the full story. …