Problems of Bakhtin's Aesthetics: the Name of the Rose As a Critical
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The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative
The limits of polyphony: Dostoevsky to Petronius MARIA PLAZA Stockholm University In times when a theorist grows as authoritative as the Russian thinker Mikh- ail Mikhailovich Bakhtin has grown today, his theories are sometimes hastily applied to more texts than they can usefully explain. While the rereading, and possibly reconception, of the Roman novel in the light of his ideas on the novelistic genre is certainly a most important and exciting project, there may be a risk of overstatement. My aim in this paper, therefore, is to suggest an answer to the question of whether Petronius’ Satyrica can be said to be a “polyphonic novel” in Bakhtin’s sense.1 The concept of “polyphony” is fully developed in Bakhtin’s book Prob- lems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics,2 although there are discussions of the related categories “dialogism” and “heteroglossia” in his important essays of the 1930’s.3 It should be noted, however, that “heteroglossia” is not equivalent to polyphony: it implies a diversity of speech styles in a language, some- times with the further requirement that the styles should reflect and inter- penetrate each other; while polyphony always requires an interpenetration of ————— 1 It is not my aim to offer an exhaustive analysis; rather, I hope to present some examples and general arguments for my suggested solution, in order to make a modest contribution to an ongoing debate about Bakhtin and the classics. 2 The first edition of this work, entitled Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo [Problems of Dostoevsky’s creative art], appeared in 1929, and was a much narrower discussion than the influential second edition of 1963. -
Narrative Epic and New Media: the Totalizing Spaces of Postmodernity in the Wire, Batman, and the Legend of Zelda
Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 8-17-2015 12:00 AM Narrative Epic and New Media: The Totalizing Spaces of Postmodernity in The Wire, Batman, and The Legend of Zelda Luke Arnott The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Nick Dyer-Witheford The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Media Studies A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Luke Arnott 2015 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Other Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Arnott, Luke, "Narrative Epic and New Media: The Totalizing Spaces of Postmodernity in The Wire, Batman, and The Legend of Zelda" (2015). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 3000. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/3000 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NARRATIVE EPIC AND NEW MEDIA: THE TOTALIZING SPACES OF POSTMODERNITY IN THE WIRE, BATMAN, AND THE LEGEND OF ZELDA (Thesis format: Monograph) by Luke Arnott Graduate Program in Media Studies A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Luke Arnott 2015 Abstract Narrative Epic and New Media investigates why epic narratives have a renewed significance in contemporary culture, showing that new media epics model the postmodern world in the same way that ancient epics once modelled theirs. -
Art and Hyperreality Alfredo Martin-Perez University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected]
University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2014-01-01 Art and Hyperreality Alfredo Martin-Perez University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the Philosophy Commons, and the Theory and Criticism Commons Recommended Citation Martin-Perez, Alfredo, "Art and Hyperreality" (2014). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 1290. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/1290 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HYPERREALITY & ART A RECONSIDERATION OF THE NOTION OF ART ALFREDO MARTIN-PEREZ Department of Philosophy APPROVED: Jules Simon, Ph.D. Mark A. Moffett, Ph.D. Jose De Pierola, Ph.D. ___________________________________________ Charles Ambler, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © By Alfredo Martin-Perez 2014 HYPERREALITY & ART A RECONSIDERATION OF THE NOTION OF ART by ALFREDO MARTIN-PEREZ Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of Philosophy THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO December 2014 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my daughters, Ruby, Perla, and Esmeralda, for their loving emo- tional support during the stressing times while doing this thesis, and throughout my academic work. This humble work is dedicated to my grandchildren. Kimberly, Angel, Danny, Freddy, Desiray, Alyssa, Noe, and Isabel, and to the soon to be born, great-grand daughter Evelyn. -
Mikhail Bakhtin and Discourse on Genre Novel
Int.J.Eng.Lang.Lit&Trans.StudiesINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE, Vol. LITERATURE3.Issue. 1.2016 (Jan-Mar) AND TRANSLATION STUDIES (IJELR) A QUARTERLY, INDEXED, REFEREED AND PEER REVIEWED OPEN ACCESS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL http://www.ijelr.in KY PUBLICATIONS RESEARCH ARTICLE Vol. 3. Issue 1.,2016 (Jan-Mar. ) MIKHAIL BAKHTIN AND DISCOURSE ON GENRE NOVEL NIYATI KABTHIYAL1, Prof. SUREKHA DANGWAL2 1Ph.D. Research Scholar, Dept. of English & MEOFL, HNBGU, Srinagar Garhwal 2Dept. of English & MEOFL, HNBGU, Srinagar Garhwal ABSTRACT In Western tradition, Socrates frequently employed a method of dialogue in argumentation, which allowed dramatic clash of juxtaposed points of view punctuated by the final word of a single person (interlocutor); and that mode of interaction came to acquire after him the name "Socratic dialogue". His disciple Plato further developed this many-voiced mode in writing, also known as Platonic dialogue; the master piece of which we have in the Republic, manifesting outstanding success of the mode. The ancient practice attracted the attention of Russian formalist and genre theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, and he used the concept while theorizing his views on the stylistic mode of the new novelistic (artistic-prose) genres vis-à-vis high poetic genres (epic, dramatic, lyric). Bakhtin located in the Socratic dialogues one of the earliest forms of what he termed variously in the novel: heteroglossia and dialogism Kristeva is later believed to have rechristianed these antecedent concepts as intertextuality (Worton & Judith Still 3). The basic property of any discourse Bakhtin locates in dialogic orientation. He perceives dialogism as pervading not only the internal dialogism of the word, but stretching beyond to cover the entire compositional structure of a discourse (Leitch 1091). -
Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire Since the Renaissance
Grotesque Anatomies Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance By David Musgrave Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance, by David Musgrave This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by David Musgrave All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5677-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5677-5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ........................................................................................................ vi Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Introduction: Menippean Satire and the Grotesque Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 40 Grotesque Transformation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: The Nose in Menippean Satire Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 64 Grotesque Association in Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Thomas Love Peacock’s Gryll Grange: Utterance, Surdity and the Ruminant Stomach Chapter Four ............................................................................................. -
A Bakhtinian Reading of Contemporary Jordanian Political Humour
Carnivalesque politics and popular resistance: A Bakhtinian reading of contemporary Jordanian political humour Yousef Barahmeh Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Portsmouth School of Area Studies, History, Politics and Literature February 2020 i Abstract This thesis examines contemporary Jordanian political humour in the context of the political history of Jordan and the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions. It applies Mikhail Bakhtin’s mid-20th century theory of carnival and the carnivalesque (folk humour) as a framework for thinking about Jordanian politics and political humour in social media spaces following the Arab Spring. The Bakhtinian approach to humour has predominantly focused on the role of humour as a revolutionary impulse that aims to attack and expose the shortcomings of established political power, as well as to highlight public attitudes towards that power. The analysis undertaken here of Jordanian politics and political humour in Jordanian social media spaces after the Arab Spring found that Bakhtin’s ‘marketplace’ is no longer the streets and material public spaces, but rather the social media spaces. The nature of the carnivals in social media spaces is in many ways just as carnivalesque as the ‘marketplace’ of Bakhtin’s Medieval France, characterised by polyphony, the overturning of social hierarchies and the presence of dialogism (and monologism) and the grotesque. To more fully address the relevance – and some of the limitations – of application of Bakhtin’s ideas about carnival to the Jordanian socio- political context after the Arab Spring, this thesis analyses key political cartoons, satirical articles, comedy sketches, politically satirical videos and internet memes produced by Jordanians from the start of the Arab ii Spring to early 2019. -
Chronotope in Western Role-Playing Video Games
CHRONOTOPE IN WESTERN ROLE-PLAYING VIDEO GAMES: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE GENERATION OF NARRATIVE MEANING THROUGH ITS DIALOGICAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE HEROIC EPIC AND FANTASY A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Eduardo Barbosa Lima Department of Social Sciences, Media and Communication Brunel University London December 2016 Chronotope in Western Role-Playing Video Games: An investigation of the generation of narrative meaning through its dialogical relationship with the Heroic Epic and Fantasy Eduardo Barbosa Lima (1234263) Abstract The development of the video game industry and the increasing popularity of the medium as a form of entertainment have led to significant developments in the discipline of game studies and a growing awareness of the cultural significance of video games as cultural artefacts. While much work has been done to understand the narrative aspect of games, there are still theoretical gaps on the understanding of how video games generate their narrative experience and how this experience is shaped by the player and the game as artefact. This interdisciplinary study investigates how meaning is created in Western Role Playing Games (WRPGs) video games by analysing the narrative strategies they employ in relation to those commonly used in Heroic Epic and Fantasy narratives. It adopts the Bakhtinian concepts of chronotope and dialogue as the main theoretical tools to examine the creation and integration of narratives in WRPGs with a special focus on the time-space perspective. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Dragon Age Origins were chosen as representatives of the WRPG video game genre while Beowulf and the tale of Sigurd, as it appears in the Poetic Edda and the Volsung Saga, were chosen as representatives of the Heroic Epic poetic tradition. -
Passages Taken from Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
Passages taken from Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1984). For a fuller understanding of Bakhtin's work one should read the work in full, but I hope the following will serve to introduce Bakhtin's concepts to beginning students of renaisance drama. Page numbers after particular passages refer the reader to the book. "Bakhtin's carnival, surely the most productive concept in this book, is not only not an impediment to revolutionary change, it is revolution itself. Carnival must not be confused with mere holiday or, least of all, with self-serving festivals fostered by governments, secular or theocratic. The sanction for carnival derives ultimately not from a calendar prescribed by church or state, but from a force that preexists priests and kings and to whose superior power they are actually deferring when they appear to be licensing carnival." (Michael Holquist, "Prologue," Rabelais and His World, xviii) From the "Introduction" "The aim of the present introduction is to pose the problem presented by the culture of folk humor in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and to offer a description of its original traits. "Laughter and its forms represent... the least scrutinized sphere of the people's creation.... The element of laughter was accorded to the least place of all in the vast literature devoted to myth, to folk lyrics, and to epics. Even more unfortunate was the fact that the peculiar nature of the people's laughter was completely distorted; entirely alien notions and concepts of humor, formed within the framework of bourgeois modern culture and aesthetics, were applied to this interpretation. -
Eddie Izzard's Bible…
THE BIBLE & CRITICAL THEORY ARTICLES Dialogism, Monologism, and Cultural Literacy: Classical Hebrew Literature and Readers' Epistemic Paradigms Terje Stordalen, Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo1 Abstract: This essay explores the question of a genealogy for dialogical thought and literature, as well as for its opposite mode: monological thought and writing. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that dialogical literature existed in antiquity, but did not elaborate much on this question and only briefly mentioned classical Hebrew examples. In fact, Bakhtin often construed the bible as the prime monological texts of European culture. Large parts of biblical Hebrew literature could, however, be seen as fundamentally dialogical. The dominance that monological modes of thought and writing (and reading!) exert today seems to rely to a great extent upon the spread of cultural literacy. If so, the monological bible is hardly more than a few centuries old. For a good two decades scholars of classical Hebrew literature have engaged with Bakhtin's writings.2 As a biblical scholar I often settled for the relatively modest aspiration to employ Bakhtin in order to make sense of biblical texts. Bakhtin, on the other hand, engaged with Dostoevsky's and others' texts in order to make sense of reality as he knew it. Running the risk of sounding too pretentious, this time I take a lead from Bakhtin and ask whether a study of biblical literature could help grasp the genealogy of dialogical thought and the apparent dominance of monological modes of writing and thinking. Trying to uncover the genealogies of monologism and dialogism is of course an impossibly broad aspiration. -
Bakhtin and Ricoeur 221
Space, Time and Narrative: Bakhtin and Ricoeur 221 Space, Time and Narrative: Bakhtin and Ricoeur Tara Collington In the preface to the second volume of Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur’s monumental study of the philosophical, historical and hermeneutic implications of the configuration of time in literature, the author describes the intrinsic paradox of examining what he refers to as the ‘fictive experience of time’: On the one hand, in effect, our temporal ways of inhabiting the world remain imaginary to the extent that they exist only in and through the text. On the other hand, they constitute a sort of trascendence within immanence that is precisely what allows for the confrontation with the world of the reader (1985b:6). In order to explore this complex interaction, Ricoeur (1984b: xi) introduces the concept of three-fold mimesis. Related to the concept of plot, mimesis encompasses three stages in our under- standing of the literary expression of time: ‘a reference back to the familiar pre-understanding we have of the order of action; an entry into the realm of poetic composition; and finally a new con- figuration by means of this poetic refiguring of the pre-understood order of action.’ Ricoeur’s focus on the interaction between the world of the text and the world of the reader as a locus for interpreting the configuration of time in literature calls to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ in which he proposes a new critical and heuristic tool-- the ‘chronotope’--to study the configuration of narrative temporality as it relates to our under- standing of genre. -
The Pros and Cons of Deconstructing Bakhtin: a Reflection on Boris Groys
ISSN: 2325-3290 (online) The pros and cons of deconstructing Bakhtin: A reflection on Boris Groys Sergeiy Sandler Independent scholar, Israel Sergeiy Sandler is a scholar and translator (into English and Hebrew) of Mikhail Bakhtin's works. He is the author of multiple articles on Bakhtin's philosophy, as well as of studies promulgating a Bakhtin- inspired approach to linguistics and the philosophy of language. In the summer of 1989, the heated debate around the theories of French poststructuralist thinkers (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others) and their American followers was all the rage in many intellectual circles. It is as a contribution to this debate that Boris Groys originally published the article, which has now been brought to us in English translation on the (Virtual) pages of the Dialogic Pedagogy Journal. The contribution was quite sophisticated—a critique of some central ideas of poststructuralism (rejecting the notion of the subject, the “death of the author”) using poststructuralism’s own methods of genealogy and deconstruction. More specifically, Groys offered a critique of poststructuralism carried out in the form of a deconstructive reading of one of poststructuralism’s “ancestors”, and his choice of “ancestor” was Mikhail Bakhtin. This, of course, required reading Bakhtin’s work as poststructuralism avant la lettre—a strained interpretatiVe exercise to say the least.1 But strained interpretations can sometimes nevertheless yield interesting results. And so it happened that Groys’ article became a somewhat scandalous classic in the field of Bakhtin scholarship. Within the context of Bakhtin scholarship, Groys’ article is a mixed bag, the way strained interpretations are prone to be. -
How Language and the Carnivalesque Challenge Hegemony
University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School March 2019 Language of Carnival: How Language and the Carnivalesque Challenge Hegemony Yulia O. Nekrashevich University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the Rhetoric Commons Scholar Commons Citation Nekrashevich, Yulia O., "Language of Carnival: How Language and the Carnivalesque Challenge Hegemony" (2019). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7868 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Language of Carnival: How Language and the Carnivalesque Challenge Hegemony by Yulia O. Nekrashevich A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Victor Peppard, Ph.D. John Lennon, Ph.D. Date of Approval: March 8, 2019 Keywords: dialogue, heteroglossia, Mikhail Bakhtin, utterance Copyright © 2019, Yulia O. Nekrashevich Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Foreword ..........................................................................................................................................1