114 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 2009 Renfrew, Alastair. Towards a New Material Aesthetics:Bakhtin, Genre and the Fates ofLiteraryTheory. Legenda, Oxford, 2006. xviii + 200 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?45.00: $69.00. Bakhtin studies have become so global an enterprise that national schools of research have now emerged as recognizable entities. Among the more distinguished of these is the group ofUnited Kingdom scholars such as David Sheperd, Craig Brandist, Ken Hirschkop, Graham Pechey and Galin Tiha nov. David Sheperd's Bakhtin Centre at Sheffield University has been the most visible sign ofUK eminence inBakhtin studies.Alastair Renfrew's book, a substantially revised version of the doctoral thesisRenfrew submitted to the University of Sheffield in 2000, is furtherproof of theUK Bakhtin School's continuing strength. It is somewhat invidious to condemn so varied a group of individualists to a generic 'school' identity. Nevertheless, certain common features can be discerned in the company Renfrew now joins. Chief among these is command of the total Bakhtin oeuvre(as it continues to emerge), a trait that gives them authority, even when you disagree with them. Renfrew, like his colleagues, has carefully read all of Bakhtin and enormous amounts of the relevant secondary literature. But unlike some others in theUK School, Renfrew is less direcdy concerned with cultural studies issues, or is so at a more abstract level of engagement. His aim ismore 'literary', in that he single-mindedly concentrates on the topic of genre as it is present throughout Bakhtin's work ? and that of his associates ? from firstto last.There are few topics more central to understanding Bakhtin, so it is surprising that genre has not been before this a more frequent subject among thosewrestling with the contradictions in his long career. While genre is a term of art in literary study, its significance is not, of course, limited to literature.Much of the interest inRenfrew's book, in fact, derives from itsmeditation on precisely this, how 'Literature comes from "not literature", and is periodically ifnot continuously renewed by it'. Renfrew understands genre as the transformative means by which the exchange is shaped: 'The question of what literature takes from "not literature" at any given point, and the transformations to which the incorporated material is subjected, involves us immediately in consideration of the distinction or "boundaries" between one type of accepted literary text and another' (P- 179) So understood, genre becomes inRenfrew's treatment of it a useful map forguidance along some of themore intriguing twistsand turns in theBakhtin canon. The book's six chapters have both a forensic and a chronological structure. The forensic line provides a connecting thread and derives from Renfrew's concept of genre as a constandy ramifying dialogue between the literaryand non-literary. Renfrew early identifies the poles of thisdialogue as 'Idealist' and 'Material'. The distinction is in its nature resistant to strict formalization, and it is a tribute to the author's subdety that he maintains a necessary, but not obfuscating ambiguity inhis definitions throughout. Stripped of Renfrew's careful nuances, 'Ideal' names the aspect of Bakhtin's thought that derives from his early and never fully abandoned involvement in REVIEWS 115 Neo-Kantianism. This aspect of Bakhtin's work results in a tendency to rigidify the event-ness of things by labelling themwith such restrictive cate gories as chronotope (and its subsets), or even novel (asRenfrew points out, Bakhtin's use of the termnovel does not exhaust the novel) (p. 113). 'Material' on the other hand is used to identify the fleeting uniqueness of encounters between event and meaning as they occur in historically specific attempts at representation. Bakhtin is, in Renfrew's argument, at his best and most Bakhtinian when he ispursuing this line. The argument's ? rough ? chronological line is based on a sound grasp ofRussian intellectual and political history: early chapters take up the context inwhich Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov began publishing, later chapters are devoted to Bakhtin's career after his 'discovery' by Kozhinov and others in i960. The firstchapters bring out aspects of Bakhtin's associates thatmake themmore interesting than they are often perceived to be by other scholars. This is especially true of the treatment ofMedvedev, who is seen as...