Bakhtin's Ideas Research Articles

ИСКУССТВОВЕДЧЕСКОЕ САМООПРЕДЕЛЕНИЕ РУССКИХ ФИЛОЛОГОВ-ФОРМАЛИСТОВ

The article considers the limits of self-definition of Russian formalist philologists as art researchers. It is demonstrated that formalism was in a state of double crisis: the crisis of ambitions of symbolism and the crisis of positivist art criticism. The crisis of symbolism forced the formalists to look for a new positivist code to substantiate their work, while the crisis of positivism itself required the use of particular aesthetic narratives. The era of general aesthetics came, which evolved from a project in the vein of B. Croce into a shared self-definition of art as probing the gap between the possible and the actual. Formalism, with its pathos of the reality of the word, could not entirely renounce the domain of the possible, which was conceptualized as the core aesthetic sphere, including the production of personal reactions to what was happening. Only the contextualization of formalism within the linguistic turn, drawing on the ideas of Bakhtin and Gadamer, allows us to realize the input of the movement not only to the methods of certain humanities, but also to the specification of art in the 20th century.

Understanding the Interpretation of Bakhtin’s Ideas in Feminist Theory

In recent years, M. Bakhtin's concepts have garnered increasing recognition in Western academic circles, finding applications in diverse fields ranging from linguistics to psychiatry. This belated recognition might appear peculiar without an appreciation for the particular historical context in which Bakhtin's ideas were introduced to the West. Their initial introduction was deeply intertwined with the evolution of feminist theory, feminist criticism, and discussions surrounding gender identity. Notably, the first English rendition of some of Bakhtin's thoughts appeared in Julia Kristeva's “Word, Dialogue and Novel” in 1966, a seminal work in feminist theory. Subsequent to this introduction, for over two decades, Bakhtinian concepts such as “voice”, “dialogism”, “hybrid construction”, “heteroglossia”, and “carnival” were predominantly employed in feminist interpretations by renowned feminist theorists, including J. Kristeva, W. Booth, and D. Bauer. This persisted even after direct translations of Bakhtin's works emerged in the 1980s. For many, this association might appear unexpected and even counterintuitive, given that Bakhtin himself did not address feminist concerns or gender topics directly, nor did he reference female authors in his literary critiques. In this article, I will examine the feminist appropriation of central Bakhtinian notions and explore how Bakhtin's theory offers a fertile ground for feminist interpretive strategies. I further contend that while this feminist embrace significantly propelled the spread of Bakhtinian concepts in the West, it simultaneously restricted their broader adoption by employing them as a “Bakhtinian toolkit” to address theoretical deficiencies and circumvent challenges in feminist theory. Often, this led to a simplistic and reductive understanding of Bakhtinian ideas. Additionally, I posit that this issue stems from a core challenge illuminated by Bakhtin's own work: translations and interpretations of the same ideas across languages are not equivalent, as they are influenced by distinct dialogic systems.

George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

Critics have read Eliot's Romola (1862–3) and Middlemarch (1871–2) as historical novels, as examples of the female Bildungsroman or as oddities and successes, respectively, within Eliot's realist oeuvre. This essay brings these strands of enquiry together in a formalist analysis, suggesting that these must not be seen as separate but connected debates about time, space and Eliot's novelistic poetics. Using Bakhtin's idea of the meaning-making nature of the chronotope, the essay reads momentous ‘road’ scenes in Eliot's two novels. As I argue, the road chronotope does not just represent moments of crisis for the protagonists and is, thus, an agent of narrative and mental change, but it also creates the symbolic, generic and affective registers in which these two novels operate. The road chronotope reveals Eliot's self-conscious experimentation with realism as she grapples with history, the individual's place in the world, and also sympathy, which is central to both her novels and her realist poetics. On a broader scale, the essay thus participates in ongoing scholarly debates about nineteenth-century novelistic form while also acknowledging the current ‘mobilities turn’ in analyses of Victorian fiction.

ПРЕДПЕРЕВОД VS. РЕЛЯТИВИЗАЦИЯ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОГО СТЕРЕОТИПА. АНГЛИЙСКИЙ И БУРЯТСКИЙ МЕДИЙНЫЙ ДИСКУРС

The article deals with the methodological problem of determining the author as a social being at the stage of pretranslation. To identify the author’s worldview and tactics of his social behavior, the article suggests a way to successively relativize national (ethno-cultural) stereotypes at the distanced, medium-distanced and close levels. The English and Buryat media discourse and the corresponding authors Owen Jones and Bair Tsyrenov serve as an illustration of the algorithm application. The theoretical basis of the research is I.S. Alekseeva's translation strategy, P.P. Dashinimayeva's typology of requirements for literary translation where regional languages of Russia are used, I.A. Yakoba's theory of cognitive-communicative parametrization of media discourse, M.M. Bakhtin's idea of stereotypes’ interrelatedness, and N.V. Sorokina's concept of ethno-cultural stereotype relativization.

DE M. BAKHTINE À J.-P. BRONCKART: ÉTUDE DE LA TYPOLOGIE DU DISCOURS

Problems of discourse typology increasingly attract the attention of linguists of various directions. This phenomenon is connected with the fact of society's transition to the digital presentation of information, which requires the creation of criteria for the classification of texts stored in various databases, access to them and their processing. The proposed study is based on the theory of speech genres of M. Bakhtin, who was one of the first to pose the question of classification of different types of discourse, basing his theory on the idea of utterance as a unit of speech. In general, M. Bakhtin's idea of speech genres can be represented by the formula: typical statements in typical circumstances. The article analyzes theories that have similar approaches to the creation of criteria for the typology of discourse, consider discourse as an interactive process associated with various types of human activity, which has an interactive and social character. In particular, the theory of discursive formations of M. Foucault is presented, which is based on the idea of the existence of ritualized forms of discourse that function in certain circumstances. The typology of verbal interactions by C. Kerbrat-Orecchioni is also analyzed, which claims that the meaning of an utterance is a product of "collaboration", that it is constructed jointly by the various speakers present. At the same time, interaction can be defined as a place of collective activity for the generation of meaning and, thus, a special role belongs to the context of communication. The theory of J.-P. Bronckart is also presented, in which the researcher focuses on the typology of texts and the analysis of linguistic units characteristic of each type of text (pronouns, argumentative and temporal determinants) and studies the general mechanisms of the production of texts/discourses and their structural properties, as well as analyzes the regularities of internal functioning of these texts/discourses.

Ken Hirschkop’s “new Bakhtin” for the English-speaking students

A review of Hirschkop K. The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xvi, 250 p. (Cambridge Introductions to Literature). Speaking today about the importance of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas for the humanities is restating the obvious. The book by the renowned Canadian literary and cultural studies scholar Professor K. Hirschkop, The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin (2021), aims at a systematic description of M.M. Bakhtin's scholarly legacy for the English-speaking reader, primarily for students. In our view, in this edition, the author solves both the traditional tasks of a textbook-reference book, written in the genre of "Introduction," and the research tasks. The Russian thinker's theory and practice analysis is presented based on the texts of his Collected Works, which, according to Hirschkop, form an image of a "new" Bakhtin. The tried and tested scheme of the Cambridge Introduction enables the author to draw a concise sketch of the scholar's life, outline the main sources and contexts of his scholarly quest, analyze key ideas and works, and describe the process of Bakhtin’s reception in the English-speaking world.

Childhood in "no galinheiro, no devagar do tempo", by Ondjaki

The African literature of Portuguese language corresponds to a relatively recent production, if we take into account the post-independence history of these countries. However, they consist of a vast and rich production from the cultural, identity, aesthetic point of view and the way in which orality is imbricated in the writing. It is in this context that the work of the Angolan Ondjaki is situated, which explores, among so many themes and perspectives, the issue of childhood, the starting point of one of his best-known works, Os da Minha Rua (2007), composed of twenty-two narratives. Among them is the text “No galinheiro, no devagar do tempo”, object of study of this article, which aims to analyze how childhood is presented in this story. For this, we developed a bibliographical research, based, in particular, on the ideas of Bakhtin (2002), Jacoby (2010), Chombart de Lauwe (1991), Lajolo (1997), among othersKeywords: Ondjaki; African Literature; Childhood.

Odakle izviru priče? - identitet i poetika

We use Andrić's posthumously published short story collection The House on Its Own (1976) to illustrate how the questions of artistic creation and identity are connected in this writer's work. We interpret the collection in the context of Jung's analytical psychology, Bakhtin's idea of the polyphonic character of truth, Andrić's own poetic writings from The Signs by the Road, and his short story Conversations with Goya whose theme and structure had already announced the narrative technique in The House on Its Own. We focused on this collection's dominant narrative technique and its purpose. Each of the stories emerges from the meeting of two individuals: the writer/narrator and the character that confides in him. The writer embraces the characters, empathizes and comprehends through emotion the other and the different in them. At the same time, the characters resemble the narrator in having multilayered identities and feeling the need for overcoming their trivial everyday life. The narrator's truth is subordinate to the characters' stories: the validation of someone else's words about oneself is simultaneously a validation of their personality and a form of self-validation. In The House on Its Own, the reader receives insight into the creative process itself and the role it plays in keeping these complex identities consistent. We point to the relation between Andrić's creative technique in this collection and Jung's technique of active imagination and we interpret the house on Alifakovac, in the spirit of Jungian analysis, as a metonymy for the narrator himself.

“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”.

Bakhtin and Cohen: The First Stages in Building the Philosophical System

Abstact. Although it is generally known that M.M. Bakhtin viewed himself as primarily a philosopher and not a philologist, the overwhelming majority of studies of his work belong to literary criticism. The purpose of this article, relying on the oral testimony of Bakhtin himself and his philosophical texts written in the Nevel-Vitebsk period (1919-1924), is to restore the origin of his philosophical sources and the content of his philosophical ideas of this period. The main idea is the concept of moral philosophy as a philosophical system, whose main subject is participative thinking and an answerable act as an event of being. One of the most important sources of these ideas was probably the philosophy of Neo-Kantianism represented by the teachings of H. Cohen. The article provides four examples of Bakhtin's continuity in relation to the Marburg philosopher - the idea of an answerable act concerning another person as the source of a human's self-consciousness and personal integrity, the idea of a correlative relationship between a person and his neighbor as an expression of a caring participatory being, the idea of distinguishing a moral attitude from an ethical-legal one and the idea of the philosophical system, whose subject is the process of interpersonal relations. In this case, the system consists not only in the integrity of the object but also in its openness. Revealing the continuity of Bakhtin's philosophical ideas regarding Cohen leads to a better understanding of these ideas and Bakhtin's originality of their development. It is also fruitful to compare the perception of Cohen's ideas by Bakhtin and their reception by another philosopher of dialogue, F. Rosenzweig.

Steamship to Argentina and Runaways: The principle of movement in the poetics of the new literary world

AbstractToday’s world is changing rapidly, and writers are sensitive to these dynamics in their work. This article examines the principle of movement in the poetics of two modern novels: Steamship to Argentina (2014) by the Russian‐German writer Alexei Makushinsky and Runaways (2007) by Polish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. As the literary analysis demonstrates, the principle of movement is a constitutive element of the artistic whole of these novels. It defines the image of the character, plot, spatial and temporal coordinates, and figurative dimension. The very titles—Steamship to Argentina and Runaways—are metaphorical and esthetically significant. To reflect this significance, the authors of this article offer an alternative translation of the title of Olga Tokarczuk's novel. When published in English, it was titled Flights. However, Runaways is semantically closer to the original Polish Bieguni and, as the article demonstrates, correlates more strongly with the semantic level of the text. Drawing on M. M. Bakhtin's ideas on the historical poetics of the novel, this study concludes that the poetics of Steamship to Argentina and Runaways is a form of representation of the new picture of the world, dynamic and transitional. This new literary world is recreated through the mobile chronotope and translingualism.

Mikhail Bakhtin's Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology. Art and Answerability

Mikhail Bakhtin's Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology. Art and Answerability

Mikhail Bakhtin’s Legacy and the Challenges of Modern Education: A 2010s’ Perspective Review of the book: Brandist C. et al. (eds) (2020) Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time

A detailed analysis of the collective monograph Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time: Bakhtinian Theory and the Process of Social Education is performed in this article, involving reflections on the place and meaning of the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) for theory and practice of Western education in the recent decades. Three major topics are covered in the book. The first one has to do with identifying the philosophical and sociocultural sources that preceded the formation of Bakhtin’s early views and largely predetermined his response to challenges of the time in his early philosophical texts and in his books about Dostoevsky and the genre of Bildungsroman. Another topic is Bakhtin’s dialogue with his contemporaries. Sometimes, this dialogue was open and active, sharply polemical, as in the situation with the latest aesthetic and literary trends of the early 1920s in Russia; at other times, however, it was “inaudible”, so researchers can only attempt to reconstruct it based on the consonance between the ideas of Bakhtin and those of Lev Vygotsky or Paulo Freire. The third topic is the transformation of Bakhtinian theory into teaching practice, whether it is about using dialogue and its potential in teaching foreign students, providing educational opportunities for the most economically vulnerable social groups in South Africa, or communicating with preschoolers in a kindergarten. The authors of the book managed to create a convincing picture of how Bakhtinian theory is becoming a key element of today’s educational research and practice. Importantly, it is not only Bakhtin’s ideas as such — the concepts of dialogue, polyphony, carnival and chronotope in the first place — that matter: there is also the unrestrained polyvocality which is indispensable for any creative practice.

Theme of Bhaktinian nature in the Odes of John Keats

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism as a theoretical framework, this article seeks to investigate the use of dialogic voice in John Keats's Odes. This research essentially delves into a dialogic interpretation of the poems "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to Psyche," "To Autumn," and "Ode on Melancholy," from the perspectives of the poems' respective themes. Keats may be seen to be an engaged and social poet of his day if his odes are analyzed from a dialogue perspective. Furthermore, Keats is an escapist poet who seeks refuge in the realm of fantasy and imagination as a means of escaping the tensions of his time.

"БАХТИНСКИЙ ВЕСТНИК" - НОВЫЙ ЭЛЕКТРОННЫЙ НАУЧНЫЙ ЖУРНАЛ ПО БАХТИНОВЕДЕНИЮ

The review deals with the first four issues of a new academic e-journal «Bakhtinsky vestnik». The articles on Bakhtin's theory are discussed; special attention is given to the replies to the Bakhtin questionnaire devoted to the 125th anniversary of Bakhtin - about the significance of Bakhtin's ideas today, his contribution to the humanities, the current state and future development of Bakhtin studies.

МИХАИЛ БАХТИН: ВОЗРОЖДЕНИЕ АВТОРА

The article presents an analysis of the autobiographical experience of the philosopher and thinker M.M. Bakhtin, done by him in the word, in the oral genre of the utterance. It is shown that, despite the refusal of the philosopher to compose memories of himself, he made a unique experience of oral storytelling, taking place in the Voice. In this context, the author of the article analyzes the main ideas of Bakhtin concerning his concept of the author and the hero through the prism of the problem of autobiography and self-report-confession, in which I and the other are the main architectonic limits. It is presented that Bakhtin himself applied the genre of self-report-confession to his personal experience of telling about himself, choosing for this the appropriate tonality of the story, the tonality of prayer-repentance. The problem of understanding Bakhtin's philosophy is shown, referring to various kinds of reductions associated with the fact that the interpretation of his philosophy takes place within the framework of the interpretation of texts and sketches. At the same time, a participatory understanding of him as an author should consist in hearing through the text his unique intonation, his author's voice.

Education-for-Myself and Education-for-the Other: The Right to Freedom of Education and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Experience

The article contains reflections on the problem which has arised in Eugene Matusov's article on freedom of education, and considers the experience of Mikhail Bakhtin as an example of the way the right to the freedom can be fulfilled. Not only Bakhtin's life and ideas play a significant role in contemporary social and educational theories and practices, but they reveal how education becomes a result of selection of particular knowledge and one's conscious choice. The core of the article is a correlation of notions “Education-for-myself” and “Education-for-the other” which are taken by the authors as derivatives of the terms of Bakhtin’s early philosophy “I-for-myself” and “I-for-the other”. Thus ideas of “Education-for-an individual” and “Education-for-the society” result from the reflections and can be evidence of the need in mutual understanding and dialogue in order to achieve freedom of education.

Beats Go On

Beats Go On

A peça Mãe de Alencar e as vozes sociais sobre a questão afro-brasileira

RESUMO Este artigo analisa a peça Mãe, de José de Alencar, que tem por cenário o Rio de Janeiro da segunda metade do séc. XIX, retratando a escravidão africana doméstica. Fundamenta-se nas ideias de Bakhtin e do Círculo, focalizando as vozes sociais sobre a escravidão presentes nas falas das personagens. A investigação leva o leitor a perceber os posicionamentos sobre a escravidão presentes no cotidiano nacional que migram para o interior do drama alencariano. Também se mobilizaram discursos historiográficos do século XX que estabelecem dialogia com a obra alencariana. As falas retratam as personagens ora submetidas ao regime escravista, ora em situação autonômica, representando a resistência ao cativeiro. A leitura da peça é importante para as gerações atuais, visto que a cultura escravocrata perdura em nossa sociedade.

La novela, género literario


 
 
 The novel is a special literary genre. Born with the open society, its history is created by the aesthetic needs posed by this type of society. These needs are expressed at three levels: the image of the character, the image of the world and the image of the word. The people of open societies have a public image and an image for themselves. It often happens that these images do not coincide. Even in Modernity, the subject does not recognize himself in his own public image. The worlds of open societies are several and give rise to abbreviated images, symbols, which Bakhtin called chronotopes. Finally, the word of open societies becomes an aesthetic register of the positions of the speakers and social changes. The novel fuses these three images and becomes a cultural event of the first order, especially in the modern world. This conception of the novel is based on the ideas of Bakhtin and aims to go one step further.