SOURCE: Emerson, Caryl. “Bakhtin After the Boom: Pro and Contra.” Journal of European Studies 32, no. 124 (March 2002): 3-26.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture on 30 October 2001, Emerson reviews controversies in Bahktinian scholarship, provides insight into Bakhtin as a teacher and reader of texts, and speculates on possible future directions for Bakhtin studies.

My topic today is the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and the contours of his posthumous life. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed an explosion of interest in Bakhtin, a thinker who hitherto had been almost wholly unknown outside his native land. Indeed, in Soviet Russia itself he was ‘discovered’ only in the early 1960s, already an old man teaching in a pedagogical institute in the provinces, with one major publication to his name (1929), a dissertation defended after the Second World War, and a trunk of manuscripts stretching over fifty years. Suddenly translations proliferated, intermediaries...