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Mikhail Bakhtin's American Legacy: 1.0 Introduction

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Mikhail Bakhtin's American Legacy: 1.0 Introduction Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy: Metamorphoses and the Practice of Cultural Theory Kenneth J. Knoespel Georgia Insititute of Technology 1.0 Introduction This lecture considers the evolving status of MikhailBakhtin within American scholarship and gives special attention to the reception of Bahktin’s work in the American academy in the past decades and what it both reveals and conceals about the relations between literary scholarship in the United States and Russia. The first part of the lecture provides an overview of Bakhtin’s presence in the United States by giving particular attention to the ideologies that should be recognized in his reception. The second part notices particular elements of Bakhtin’s work and the ways they are contributing to the ongoing emergence of cultural studies in North America. The third part explores aspects of Bakhtin’s work that deserve further attention. Here I will ask how Vladimir Bibler and Anatoly Akhutin extend questions raised by Bakhtin. Just as Bakhtin’s study of discourse structures within the novels of Dostoevsky provided a way of thinking about the cognitive bridging in the imaginary space of literature, an important aspect of his work may also be applied to the study of scientific and technological texts. I will conclude by noticing how Bakhtin challenges readers to ask how we generate and use the socio-cultural constructions such as “epoch” and “period” used to bridge cultural relations at the end of the 20th century and to characterize history itself. I will suggest that Bakhtin capacity to ask how transcultural synchronisms work to both bring together and separate cultural experience may be identified as a major feature of his extensive legacy. How then are we to explain the “grotesquely anachronistic influence” of Bakhtin’s thought? How are we to account for the position of a non Marxist, nonFormalist, nonFreudian, nonStructuralist, nonexistentialist, noncollectivist, nonutopian, nontheologian? In short, how can we account for a scholar who appears a non- modernist but who became the very subject of a post-modernist bakhtinskii boom? The questions posed by Vitaly Makhlin for Russian colleagues in 1992 confront anyone who surveys the links between Bakhtin’s 1 2 Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy writings let alone their bearing in a post-modernist American landscape that seems to change under our feet as we speak.1 Although I hardly can begin to answer Makhlin’s questions from a Russian vantage point, I would like to venture a few observations of my own on the extraordinary metamorphosis of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin within an American setting. Since there are many Bakhtins, I would like to clarify at the outset the frames that I am using to approach Bakhtin. Russian and Euro-American scholars together now divide Bakhtin’s work and life (1895-1975) into five periods:2 1) His early life as the son of a merchant family from the Orel region (gymnasium years in Vilnius and Odessa) to university studies in Petersburg and his degree in classical studies in 1918); 2) the time in Nevel’/Vitebsk (1919-1924) where he taught language and literature and explored formalist linguistics; 3) his return to Leningrad (Petrograd), (1924-1929) where he continued his group work on formalism. (And when he lived for a short period of time with his wife at Peterhof); 4) the period of being on the margins: exile (Kazakhstan) and teaching (Saransk, Savelovo) from 1930 to the early 1950’s; 5) a late period between 1950s and 1975 when he received a degree for his work on Rabelais and becomes reassimilated into Russian literary culture. As the Bakhtin bibliography shows, the sifting and resifting through each of these periods has been a complicated task. (My single-handout offers a chronology of Bakhtin’s work as well as Russian and American publication dates.) A detailed affirmation of Bakhtin’s accomplishment together with an implicit prediction of its importance for the future appears in Caryl Emerson’s book, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin.3 The 1999 book on Bakhtin by Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy carries special importance because of its meticulous review of the archival problems surrounding Bakhtin’s manuscripts and their Russian publication.4 As both Emerson and Hirschkop know, it is hardly an exaggeration to talk about a Bakhtin industry. Bakhtin has become a scholarly equivalent of a Medieval poet whose texts have been so dispersed that one is continually confronted with questions of authenticity or chronology. Indeed Bakhtin’s legacy hardly depends on the web sites or digital versions of his work but on a painstaking assembly of a mass of material. This archival work pertains not only to Bakhtin but to the complex dissemination of intellectual activity during the Soviet period. From such a vantage point, Bakhtin should not be isolated but taken as a mark of the important scholarship that took place during the Soviet period. My remarks this afternoon will hardly create a “whole” Mikhail Bakhtin but will instead suggest that the legacy of Bakhtin in the United States has gone through several stages. Rather than simply providing a historical overview, however, I will argue that the most important work on Bakhtin is our own contemporary work. 1 Cited in Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 4. See also V. L. Makhlin, “Nasledie M. M. Bakhtina v kontekste sapadnogo postmodernizma,’ in MMB kak filosof 92, 206-20, espe. 206, 209-10, 219. 2 For periodization see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of Prosaics (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990) 3 Emerson, The First Hundred Years. 3 1.1 Ideologies of Reception A fundamental mark of Bakhtin’s critical philosophy involves his challenge that we become aware that the language with which we work is never ours alone.5 In sharp contrast to poetic theory that would individualize the experience of language--a kind of Cartesian poetics—Bakhtin reminds us that we are in continuous conversation with others. Such a cognitive and dialogical understanding of language requires us to acknowledge that the reception of Bakhtin is hardly neutral but that it is received into a developed intellectual network. Indeed in that even our discussions at this conference are hardly neutral but must be approached from our already being engaged. Certainly it is necessary at the outset to recognize that the Cold War has functioned as a filter of reception in the case of Bakhtin. If we wish, we may ask about the perception or distortion of the Soviet Union through the “lens” of the iron curtain. What was seen and what was not seen through this lens? Whether one considers the anti-communist work of generations, the Soviet Union was often translated into a dangerous and sometimes exotic landscape. Of course, the landscape was filtered again by a distinction between the Soviet Union and the Russians. It is interesting that one finds no references to Bakhtin in the work of Isaiah Berlin who certainly functioned as one of the cultural filters of Cold War ideology. While the Soviets were evil, the Russians could represent an even greater ideal of humanity. The Cold War intensified the western romance of the Russian nineteenth century. Within such a setting, Bakhtin became first and foremost a figure that followed the American discovery of Boris Pasternak, Nadezhda Mandelstahm, and Joseph Brodsky. But how then was Bakhtin read? Was it his intellectual work that was most significant or his figure as “another” Russian intellectual who suffered more than we can imagine? Intellectual or saint within a moral drama? Where should we place Bakhtin in our own academic carnivals?6 Since I raise these questions allow me to give an overview of my own engagement in Bakhtin. I think that I first heard the name Bakhtin at the University of Wisconsin where Professor Stephen Nichols, a student of Rene Wellek, talked about Rabelais and His World in a 1968 graduate seminar on the history of literary theory. For a more detailed encounter, I needed to wait until I had visited the Soviet Union for the first time in 1971. While teaching at the University of Uppsala (1970-73), I often spoke with Annika 4 Ken Kirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999) 5 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London: Routledge, 1990) 6 Eric Hobsbawm makes the following observation about the historiographic consequences of the end of the twentieth century: “Again, even the world which has survived the end of the October Revolution is one whose institutions and assumptions were shaped by those who were on the winning side of the Second World War. Those who were on the losing side or associated with it were not only silent and silenced, but virtyually written out of history and intellectual life except in the role of ‘the enemy’ in the moral world drama of Good versus Evil. (This may now also be happening to the losers in the Cold War of the second half of the century, though probably not to quite the same extent or for so long.) This is one of the penalties of living through a century of religious wars. Intolerance is their chief characteristic. From The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 4-5. 4 Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy Bäckstöm, a Swedish scholar of Russian literature whose scholarship and translation of Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Admoni, and Joseph Brodsky introduced names that I would never have encountered in the United States. When I returned to the United States and began my graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1974, one of my first encounters with my professors in comparative literature was with the Russian Slavist Edward Wasiolek who was in the process of editing Dostoevsky’s notebooks.
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