SOURCE: Haynes, Deborah J. “Bakhtin and the Visual Arts.” In A Companion to Art Theory, edited by Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde, pp. 292-302. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

In the following essay, Haynes discusses how Bakhtin's aesthetic theory might contribute to the study of the visual arts by making the viewing of and study of art more answerable and interactive.

Since Bakhtin's writings consistently began to appear in print in the 1960s, his name has often been associated with concepts such as “carnival,” developed in Rabelais and His World, and “dialogue” or “dialogism,” developed in The Dialogical Imagination.¹ But concentration on the carnivalesque or the dialogic has tended to skew the adaptation of Bakhtin's work by scholars in a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Among the disciplines in which scholars have fruitfully engaged his ideas are: communication and media studies, composition, cultural studies, education and educational theory, ethics, film and...