In the following essay, Wall argues that Bakhtin is a fundamentally fragmentary thinker and that those who attempt to reconstruct his lost thought from his fragments both misread Bakhtin and misunderstand the process of cultural memory.

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.

Mikhail Bakhtin made important contributions to several different areas of thought, each with its own history, its own language, and its own shared assumptions. As a result, literary scholars have perceived him as doing one sort of thing, linguists another, and anthropologists yet another. We lack a comprehensive term that is able to encompass Bakhtin's activity in all its variety, a shortcoming he himself remarked when as an old man he sought to bring together the various strands of his life'...

In the following essay, Kelly compares Bakhtin's approach toward utopian systems and systemic thinking to that of his compatriot and predecessor Alexander Herzen, considered the father of Russian socialism.

In the following essay, which was originally published in French in 1981, Todorov discusses Bakhtin's theory of literary history as found in several of his works. The critic summarizes Bakhtin's theories of genre and discusses Bakhtin's concept of the “dialogic” in narrative and history—the plurality of competing languages, discourses, and voices within a single literary or historical work.

Baxtin studies have come of age. For evidence of this one should look not at the exploding number of references, nor at the extraordinary seepage of his name into unlikely disciplines, nor even at the frequency of old themes now being newly reworked under the labels "dialogic" or "carnivalesque." Signs of maturity are registered, rather, in the nature of the dialogue. In the past two years, several "stabilizing" events have occurred. A major biography has appeared i...

In the following essay, Hitchcock uses the biographical details of Bakhtin's physical deterioration and the amputation of his legs in an exploration of the possibilities of the grotesque inherent in the carnival.

In the following essay, Morson discusses Bakhtin's fascination with indeterminism and his concept of “open time” in narrative.

In the following essay, Bernard-Donals draws upon Bakhtin's notions of carnival and subversion to explore “the impossible contradiction of writing what cannot be written” in postcolonial literature by historically marginalized and disempowered voices, and demonstrates the influence of Bakhtin's work on postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Mikhail M. Bakhtin is best known for his visionary conception of carnival—the carnivalesque, "carnival consciousness," "the culture of laughter"—as a model for the regeneration of time and the world and the emancipation of the human spirit: "This carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things" Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H...

In the following essay, Adlam discusses the ways in which Bakhtin's concepts of carnival, double-voicing, heteroglossia, and polyphony have been employed in feminist literary criticism, arguing that Bakhtin was a precursor of feminist theories of language.

During the period of the New Economic Policy, as Lenin sought, rather abashedly, to approach communism via a new form of "state capitalism," and as the concrete mode of peasant existence was being transformed into the abstractions of industrial labor, the contradictions between synchrony and diachrony, between "sincerity" and "irony," between insistences simultaneously upon meaning and "multivocality" were in full flower. The work of the Bakhtin school...

In the following essay, Holquist explores the relationship between the sacred and the profane in Bakhtin's theory of the novel.

Mikhail Bakhtin is acknowledged in increasingly wide circles as a sensitive observer of popular culture in its socio-historical context. His acute study of the folkloric rituals of carnival—from the phallophors of epic Saturnalia, whose role was to joke and cavort obscenely, to the rogue comedians at turn-of-the-century country fairs—uncovers a vast and fertile dialogue of heteroglossia. Not only at the carnival but pervading all levels of language, Bakhtin identifies infinitely shifting heter...

In the following essay, Hirschkop examines the conflation of dialogue and dialogism in Bakhtin's work and in the academic discourse that has subsequently developed around it.

In the following essay, Peterson draws parallels between Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and Henry Louis Gates's work on the “double-voicedness” of African-American literature.

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.

The present essay explores the nature of characters and narrators in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle. Our project is a hazardous one because Bakhtin's texts do not provide us with a systematic discussion of this problem. As a consequence, it must be understood that the passages we have selected for discussion are taken out of a variety of contexts in his essays. As well, they come from all of his various intellectual periods. We have tried to systematize the concept of character in a s...

Outstanding among scholars who survived the decimation of the Leningrad intelligentsia in the late twenties and thirties is the literary historian, theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. By the time of his death at the age of eighty in 1975, Bakhtin's reputation as an original thinker in the semiotic-structuralist manner was rapidly growing, both abroad and in his native land. Eulogies from, among others, Julie Kristeva (1970) and the Soviet semiotician Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivano...

Bakhtin formulates his theory of the utterance on two occasions: once during the late twenties, in the texts signed by Medvedev and especially by Voloshinov; and in several works published at the end of the fifties, some thirty years later. I will present these two syntheses separately, although there is no great difference between them (in fact, the only changes involve accentuations of various aspects of the utterance). The first general formulations concerning the utterance are already to be found in Fre...

The set of problems that surrounds the relationship between fiction and reality in the novel recurs in many forms to organize contemporary theories of narration as well as of the relationship between narrative, discursive, and poetic language. Much is at stake, stylistically, philosophically, and historically, in these discussions whose importance, not only in the realm of theory but also in the practical sphere of ethics and politics, is superseded only by their difficulty. The higher the stakes the harder...

Two citations from Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) are enough to suggest the difficulty involved in coming to any terms (in that phrase's sense of a unifying label and a temporal enclosure) with this increasingly important Russian writer. The first citation comes from his third chapter, "The Idea in Dostoevsky": "It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousness, one that is, so t...