Bakhtin's Ideas Research Articles

Візуалізація етичних змістів у чарівній казці

Contemporary culture is represented in the paper in the fairy tale optics in its ethical dimensions. Such prospects allow to ascertain ethical values which contemporaneity draws in archaic stratum of culture and generates basing on invariants of past. Using M. M. Bakhtin's ideas of great time of culture and outsideness, the author exposes a fairy tale as a phenomenon that once appeared in archaics but in every further cultural-historic period is able to represent its new facets what are unknown to all previous epochs. A fairy tale acts in therapeutic, orienting and educational functions since the time if its origins. Today a fairy tale has lost archaic horror tinge and obtained some romantic veil and moralistic color. These dimensions are reflected in an image of a hero. The paper points out the distinction between ethical and democratic heroes (the idea of M. E. Meletinsky). It is mentioned that content of an image of a democratic hero is better grasped by the N. Tec's concept a "dormant hero". It is a dormant hero whom contemporary culture comprehends most of all types of a fairy tale heroes. He leaves an impression that everybody can find oneself at his place. His heroic powers are ex- posed gradually. During the storytelling, it is turned out that he possesses definite virtues, personifies moral integrity. It is mentioned in the paper that today there are transformations in the comprehension what qualities are virtues. Qualities necessary for support of ancestors' cult as well as for keeping house were considered as virtues in archaic culture whereas contemporaneity represents in current fairy tale adaptations qualities clear for people today, such as valor, courage, resourcefulness, quick-wittedness. Virtues allow hero to negotiate obstacles, pass tests. Ethical pathos of a fairy tale is accumulated in victorious struggle against evil, for realization of justice, resumption of the lost equity. Ethical content of a fairy tale are visualized. At the basic level, visualization of good and evil is represented in immediate reality of beauty and ugliness. The second level of ethical content visualization is specified by imagination which allows audience to create images and visualize meanings in free flight of fancy. The third level is determined by proper ability of a fairy tale to use symbols. At that level, heroes are represented as symbols-keepers of cultural memory.

Dickinson's Dao

Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the epistemic advantage of a cultural outsider, this essay seeks to enrich the newly developed Chinese critical perspective of rereading Emily Dickinson by arguing that Dickinson's explorations of spiritual ideals resonate with Daoism and Chan Buddhism in their focus upon non‐action as a perfect action that entails consummate skills, sensuous eradication, and egoless aesthetics. Specifically, Dickinson uses the perfect actions to illustrate wandering (staying) at ease; she uses dropping‐brain to emblematize eradicating senses; she exhorts self‐surrender and non‐interference when dealing with the other; and she practices an egoless aesthetics that surpasses her predecessors and contemporaries.

Ligações químicas em livros didáticos de química: uma análise dos elementos dos gêneros de discurso

Using the ideas of Bakhtin and inserting them in the broader frame of discursive studies, this paper analyzes the elements of discursive genres found in chemistry textbooks texts. Chemistry twelve books were analyzed, aimed at students of the first high school series of public and private schools. Three books have been recommended by the National Textbook Program ‐ PNLD/2012 and chosen by a large number of public school teachers. The object of the study was content Chemical Bonds. It was possible to identify recaps, calls and metaphors (the didactic genre elements); description, classification, explanation and definition (the scientific genre elements). The context element was just described in the analyzed books. The use of metaphor was predominant in the book H.

The Speech of Dasein: Heidegger and Quotidian Discourse

Martin Heidegger's denunciation of Gerede (idle talk) in §35 of Sein und Zeit is scathing: “Idle talk is constituted in this gossiping and passing the word along, a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness.” But how might this concept be understood in relation, for example, to Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic and heteroglossia or to the notion of discours as it has been developed by Émile Benveniste, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette? This essay undertakes a reading of the “lapse” or entanglement of Dasein that situates the place of Gerede in its sense-making capacity. This potential of Gerede—one that is based on the covering/uncovering mode of Erschlossenheit and of truth as a-leitheia—draws out an implication of Sein und Zeit that in part runs counter to its explicit argument and to Heidegger's later work on language.

Midlands cadences: Narrative voices in the work of Alan Sillitoe

This paper will examine excerpts from a range of Alan Sillitoe’s prose fiction, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and short stories from the collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1958), via a comparative exploration of the texts’ representations of Midlands English demotic. The narrative discourse traces a link between the experience of the Midlands English working classes represented and the demotic language they speak; the narrators have voices redolent of registers rooted in 1950s English working-class life. The texts also contain different methods of representing their protagonists’ consciousness through the demotic idiolects that they speak. Sillitoe’s is a novelistic discourse which refuses to normalise itself to accord with the conventions of classic realism, and as such prefigures the ambitions of many contemporary writers who incline their narrative voices towards the oral – asserting the right of a character’s dialect/idiolect to be the principal register of the narrative. The paper will demonstrate this thesis through the ideas of Bakhtin, and through an analytical taxonomy derived from literary stylistics. It aims to propose a model which can be used to analyse and explore any fiction which has been labelled as ‘working-class’, and asserts that such an approach leads to a more principled characterisation of working-class fiction (based on its use of language) than current literary-critical discussions based simply on cultural/social context and biography.

Translanguaging in an academic writing class: Implications for a dialogic pedagogy

Academic writing for second language speakers remains a huge challenge for instructors and students worldwide. However, the rhetorical interface between English and African languages has hardly been explored to develop better translingual pedagogies for programmatic scaling. In this study we sought to explore the use of dialogic pedagogy, where Sesotho and English rhetorical conventions are code-meshed among first-year university students at a large urban university in South Africa. Drawing on the theoretical ideas of Bakhtin and Vygotsky’s sociocultural framework, this study is premised on dialogic instruction that is characterised by the teacher’s uptake of student ideas, authentic questions and the opportunity for students to modify the topics while using more than one language. Data were collected through metacognitive reflective interview of eight first-year students registered for a Bachelor of Education degree programme. The study found that dialogic instruction facilitates awareness in the students as they construct their desired voices in writing through the use of compensation and social strategies when they translanguage between L1 writing (Sesotho) and L2 writing (English). We argue that translanguaging is a relevant framework for academic literacy and that it provides optimal conditions for dialogic pedagogy in multilingual contexts. Recommendations for further research are considered at the end of the paper.

Bakhtin e Cassirer: o evento e a máquina

RESUMO A influência da obra de Cassirer nos escritos de Bakhtin da década de 1930 tem sido estudada em detalhe, mas os estudiosos ainda não examinaram o trabalho inicial de Bakhtin, Para uma filosofia do ato (K filosofii postupka), em relação à filosofia de Cassirer. O artigo primeiramente revela o quão sintonizado Bakhtin estava não somente com o Zeitgeist intelectual de seu próprio tempo, mas também com o do século 20. A intrigante harmonia intelectual entre as ideias de Bakhtin e de Cassirer pode ser vista no início da carreira de Bakhtin. Os dois pensadores estão unidos na sua recepção, transformação e tentativa de conciliar duas posições filosóficas antitéticas dominantes no início do século XX: a filosofia transcendental de Kant, o Neokantismo e o Lebensphilosophie de Simmel, Bergson e Heidegger. Bakhtin e Cassirer ficaram alarmados com o pessimismo cultural e o potencial niilismo inerente à posição da Lebensphilosophie. Em seguida, o autor mostra maneiras como as ideias de Bakhtin e de Cassirer repercutem nas de Jacques Derrida, no final do século XX.

The Kuchars, the 1960s and queer materiality

This essay explores the peculiar, largely unexplored queerness of Mike and George Kuchar's 1960s films through a combination of close reading, material culture studies, art history and critical theory. Using the conceptual leverage provided by Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas on the carnivalesque and Georges Bataille's notion of heterology, it proposes that queerness in the Kuchars’ films takes the form of a generalized demotion whose main objects are sexuality, desire, and the material culture of plastic consumables in their immediate environment. These are insistently reduced to, or brought in contact with, excrement, and thus rendered doubly disreputable – because of their the scandalous nature and low cultural status, and because they are smeared with a defiling substance whose open display signals bodily and communal disorder. The essay traces the origins of their queer worldview in the popular culture of the 1950s, especially in the crime and horror comics, explores the role of excrement in the iconography and syntax of their films, and shows how the excremental is used to subvert the hygienic aspirations of the plastic modernity of their youth. A final section locates their strategies of subversion and their scatophilia in the broader context of 1960s experimental art and reads their work as a queer critique of the mid-century everyday.

<i>Coriolanus</i>: Celebrating a Bakhtinian Anarchic Body of Roman Republic

The last tragedy of Shakespeare, Coriolanus (1608), is one of the most ignored and controversial Shakespearian plays towards which there has always been a sort of dislike. Despite the fact that the dislike is attributed by many critics to the play's harshness, it can be analyzed in terms of the play's protagonist and the low language he uses. Cursing language is the most important feature of Coriolanus which undermines him into a grotesque figure, removes the audience's and the reader's sympathy with him, and questions the authoritative language of the play. This study uses Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas to bring under scrutiny Shakespeare's unpopular protagonist in terms of his cursing and obscene language or voice. Using such ideas as "heteroglossia," "grotesque body" and "carnival" it will be argued that Shakespeare through language makes the audiences sympathize neither with patricians nor plebeians, but gets them to stand and criticize a contemporary issue. This so-called "alienation effect" created by Shakespeare changes the play into an epic theatre. Also, it is shown that "heteroglossia" and the grotesque quality of Coriolanus' language help to undermine the authoritative or "unitary language" of the play as a systematic whole. In other words, the stable society and language Shakespeare is after are subverted by the heteroglot and grotesque language of Coriolanus and Menenius.

Amateur Work: Reader Participation and Dialogism in Late-nineteenth-century Domestic Design Advice

ABSTRACTThis article offers a rereading of Victorian domestic design advice that emphasizes its dialogic qualities rather than presuming its didactic or discursive status. Previous work on late nineteenth-century design advice literature has rightly identified its distance from everyday practice, but various publications demonstrate that domestic design was mediated by readers and often developed through an ongoing conversation with them. This article identifies the dialogic apparatus of one late nineteenth-century how-to magazine, Amateur Work (1881–96), edited by Francis Chilton-Young. Adopting Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism (how texts emerge from different authors and “extraliterary” contexts), this article shows how Amateur Work's editor and writers were in constant dialog with their readers, principally through the reader-response column in each issue entitled “Amateurs in Council.” Case studies on bookcase and fernery construction in this section serve as examples of how content was generated out of reader-to-reader interaction, how tips were shared, and how readers adapted advice to their particular circumstances. Such evidence challenges the presumption that readers of domestic design advice were passive, uncritically following prescriptions by authors or reading such literature for entertainment alone.

Paradoxes of Acting: Bakhtin and Stanislavsky

While much has been written about Bakhtin's later writings, most notably Rabelais and his World, little attention has been paid to his early manuscripts written in the mid-1920s. In this article Dick McCaw compares Bakhtin's early philosophical ideas about authorship and Stanislavsky's theory about how an actor creates a character. Bakhtin argues that actors can only be authors when they remain outside the character. He agrees that there is a need for empathy, but that this moment of co-experiencing with the character is followed by a return to oneself. Although this would seem to fly in the face of Stanislavsky's demand for the actor's empathetic identification with their role, McCaw concludes that both writers agreed that there was a necessary doubleness in the consciousness of the actor. This article develops ideas first considered in McCaw's PhD, ‘Bakhtin's Other Theatre’ (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004) and now being reworked as a book on Bakhtin and the theatre of his time. Dick McCaw is a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, and has written With an Eye for Movement (2006) and edited the Laban Sourcebook (2011).

O blog de notícias: do hipergênero ao hiperleitor

À luz dos estudos bakhtinianos sobre a teoria da enunciação e dos gêneros do discurso, o presente trabalho tem como objetivo discutir as estratégias discursivas utilizadas por autor/leitor em blog de notícias, na internet. Com base nas concepções de Bakhtin, são abordadas as estratégias discursivas presentes no blog Pimenta na Muqueca, considerando-se a ocorrência da mediação desse hipergênero e a constituição do leitor. Foram selecionadas, aleatoriamente, três notícias contendo comentários de leitores, as quais foram extraídas do blog, que se encontra hospedado na internet no endereço: www.pimenta.blog.br. Levando-se em conta as questões de uso da língua através da tecnologia e da linguagem mediada por computador, a opção pelo blog justifica-se por se tratar de uma ferramenta criada para permitir a interação com o usuário, ou seja, é um espaço virtual onde o leitor pode responder, comentar e, com isso, redimensionar os textos veiculados. Portanto, neste estudo, são observadas as estratégias utilizadas por leitores do blog Pimenta na Muqueca, os quais, através de seus comentários, num movimento simultâneo de concordar e/ou discordar, assumem uma atitude responsiva ativa e complementam o discurso, tornando-se também autores dos textos veiculados.

Does he write plays?

ABSTRACTFrom the perspective of a disabled playwright, it is notable that the best-known plays about disability have been written by able-bodied authors. Looking back over a 30-year career which began promisingly, when Peggy Ramsay signed him on, the author selects and describes the twelve plays by which he would most like to be remembered. His early work was strangely shocking to able-bodied audiences in its open treatment of ‘nasty’ disabled lives. The sinister implication may be that ambiguity is reserved for able-bodied writers. More recently, influenced by Bakhtin's ideas about Carnival and the grotesque vision of Rabelais, he has written plays for an undergraduate module led by the director Martin Harvey, and been impressed by the capacity of able-bodied students to portray the disabled experience.

Hospital Publications: Is This My Link to a Healthier Life?

Hospitals use newsletters to reach their patient base. Within these newsletters, health narratives are communicated to inspire community members to choose that hospital for their health needs. Because health narratives inform our understanding of health care delivery, I employ Bakhtin's (1984) ideas on monologic and dialogic discourse to analyze newsletters published by a major hospital network. Results indicate a monologic rather than dialogic discourse, which excludes patient's unique experiences, advances normalization of medicine, and perpetuates hierarchical power dynamics. In summary, this study suggests practical implications for practitioners producing health knowledge for consumers of health information.

Narrative Ballet as Multimedial Art: John Neumeier's The Seagull

Abstract This article approaches narrative ballet as a theatrical art created through the intersection of dance, music, and literature. Following the nineteenth century's tendency to separate ‘the Arts,’ scholars, journalists, and often the dancers themselves portray ballet as an art of choreography and virtuoso bodies, while relegating the music, story, and visual designs to supportive if not negligible roles. My article counteracts this trend by approaching ballet as a multimedial art, in which meaning is made at the points where the specific arts intersect. Audience members perceive the ballet as a composite work, in which all three elements are equally present and important. Using this model, musicologists and literary critics can and should engage contemporary narrative ballets as complex and relevant art of our time. John Neumeier's The Seagull (2002) demands this type of analysis, because it is clear that as the author of the choreography, costumes, lighting, and set design, Neumeier considers all media involved—visual, aural, and literary—as equally generative elements of a ballet. His role is more of a multimedia artist than a choreographer. He is also responsible for the adaptation from Chekhov's eponymous play and for application of musical selections borrowed from Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Shostakovich, and Evelyn Glennie. Indeed, his choice to present a Chekhov play known for its subtle weaving of verbal dialogue to convey character, mood, and themes seems to force the audience member and critic to reconsider her traditional understanding of what ballet can and cannot do. As an example of a multimodal approach to ballet, this article presents five literary and musical devices expanded to describe the varied interplay of the visual, aural, and literary components in The Seagull. Bakhtin's idea of heteroglossia appears on the ballet stage in the assignment of distinct dance styles to each of the four protagonists, a technique that develops each character by imbuing them with the historical and social connotations of their movement style. Neumeier manipulates the irrefutable connection between music and dance through audiovisual irony in two scenes, where the dance conveys one message, but the music belies it, revealing the underlying ironic truth of the characters' situations. All three modalities are employed to shift time into and out of a reflective space, where the sincerest characters are shown to explore their emotional and artistic dilemmas. Like Chekhov, Neumeier employs echo characters—secondary figures who mirror the conflicts of the main protagonists, allow the author(s) to further develop the play's themes. In this ballet, Masha “echoes” Nina's unrequited love, her movements, music, color palette, and her choices by negation. Through overt application of seagull imagery, Neumeier draws dance and music history—namely, Swan Lake and the pathos of the dying swan—into his ballet, The Seagull.

A Brief Review of Theoretical Underpinnings, Definitions and Typical Configurations of Collaborative Writing

The aim of this paper is to review the underlying concepts, theoretical background, the existing definitions, various forms of collaborative writing normally used in educational settings as well as some sample studies carried out in different contexts. The article begins by providing an epistemological dichotomy of the existing educational paradigms and discusses the positioning of collaborative learning in relation to the dichotomy (transmissional vs. transformative). It then considers how collaborative writing is theoretically backed up by the ideas of Bakhtin (1981), Halliday (1978), and Vygotsky (1978). The review also compares the salient definitions of collaborative writing and critically contrasts various configurations of collaborative writing with regard to the findings of research studies. The article concludes by recommending a few directions for the future research.

A hermeneutic perspective on dialogical psychology

Leiman is surely right that Bakhtin's dialogism is of immense importance for psychotherapy research and psychology in general. Here I argue that Bakhtin's ideas represent an attractive third alternative to modern individualism and postmodern relativism. Philosophical hermeneutics also outlines such an alternative, one that richly complements Bakhtin's dialogism. Nevertheless, I suggest that some contemporary Bakhtinian theorists may veer too far in the direction of a radically decentered notion of the self. They stress Bakhtin's notion of “centrifugal” forces, but downplay his equally important conception of “centripetal” ones, in human communication. I suggest that hermeneutic philosophy sketches a more balanced and credible approach to finding a genuine alternative to modern individualism and postmodernist relativism.

Finding Voices in a Changing World: Standard Language Education as a Site for Developing Critical Literacies

What are the “key competencies” needed in our time? What literacy is needed to make students active participants in their societies and contributors to changing cultures? This article offers a contribution to the ongoing discussion about these questions. It takes as its point of departure the “key competencies” formulated in the OECD program Definition and Selection of Competencies (DeSeCo) in response to educational challenges in a changing world, and the five “basic skills” to be developed in all school subjects from year 1 to year 13 in the Norwegian curriculum of 2006 (LK06). It argues, first, for the need to understand “basic skills” in the perspective of DeSeCo “key competencies”, with a focus, as formulated in DeSeCo, on using tools interactively, acting autonomously, and interacting in heterogeneous groups. Secondly, the aims and purposes of the school subject “Norwegian” in Norway, as formulated in LK06, are discussed in relation to the aims of the DeSeCo key competencies and the concepts of critical literacy and Bildung. Thirdly, the article offers a discussion of how standard language education can become a site for the development of key competencies and critical literacies, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about utterances and voices and Roz Ivanic's about discoursal identities, and talking about the StLE subject as a potential public space, a stage, a resonance room, and a cultural workshop. Finally, some concluding remarks are made about the crucial role of the teacher in such a curriculum, and about the role of standard language education in relation to other school subjects.

Taking a bite out of "Buffy": Carnivalesque play and resistance in fan fiction

Popular culture provides a vital point of entry to examine discourses of hegemony and resistance at work within the growing culture of fandom. Drawing from epistemologies of feminism and poststructuralism, we deconstruct how fans read, co-construct, apply, and reenvision texts as they navigate societal notions of gender in their own constructions of subjectivity. We discuss subversive examples of sexuality and gender found in American popular culture, particularly the portrayal of femininity in the character of Faith, the bad girl from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Such examples are important because they impart crucial hegemonic lessons that may then be played out in everyday life. By focusing on the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we examine the discourses of risk at play within the source text, fan sites, and online fan fiction. Bakhtin's ideas of carnival drive much of fan fiction, and Foucault's analysis of power relations as well as Butler's theories of performativity contribute to play that affords dynamic, critical perspectives with which to interrogate social metanarratives and their impact on the subject.

Bakhtin's dialogical theory and exchange of ideas in talk radio

This article seeks to establish the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's (1895–1975) theory of dialogue/carnival to the shifting realities of talk radio in the United States (US). Scholars have used Bakhtin's ideas as they apply to the media since the mid-1980s, but these applications are either too general or fragmentary. The theory of dialogue/carnival in its holistic format, presented by Bakhtin in a variety of works, can be fruitfully explored in communication studies. The intimate connection between Bakhtin's two major ideas, dialogue and carnival, are incarnated in talk radio, demonstrating that carnival with its unrestricted freedom serves as a prerequisite for meaningful dialogue. This article estimates the value of talk radio for society as a relatively safe place where ideas can be tested before they are fully introduced to the larger society, and where the individuals involved form their ideological and ontological selves.