The Bakhtin Reader
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THE BAKHTIN READER Selected Writingsof Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov Edited by Pam Morris Lecturer in English, Liverpool John Moores University With a Glossary compiled by Graham Roberts Lecturer in Russian,University of Strathclyde ~ ARNOLD A member of the Hodder Headline Group LONDON First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Edward Arnold, reprinted in 2003 by Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH http://www.arnoldpublishers.com Distributed in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © 1994 Selection and editorial matter Pam Morris © 1994 Glossary Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency: 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Whilst the advice and information in this book is believed to be true and accurate at the date of going to press, neither the author nor the publisher can accept any responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the library of Congress ISBN O 340 59267 2 9 10 Typeset in Helvetica and Times by Wearset, Boldon, Tyne and Wear Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction I Section One: Dialogic Discourse I Critique of Saussurian Linguistics (Voloshinov/Bakhtin) 25 2 Critique of Freudianism (Voloshinov/Bakhtin) 38 3 Language as Dialogic Interaction (Voloshinov/Bakhtin) 48 4 Reported Speech as Index of Social Change (Voloshinov/Bakhtin) 61 5 Social Heteroglossia (Bakhtin) 73 6 Speech Genres (Bakhtin) 80 Section Two: The Heteroglot Novel 7 Dostoevsky's Polyphonic Novel: A Plurality of Consciousnesses (Bakhtin) 88 8 The Dialogic Idea as Novelistic Image (Bakhtin) 97 9 Double-Voiced Discourse in Dostoevsky (Bakhtin) I 02 IO The Heteroglot Novel (Bakhtin) 112 (Note on the TwoStylistic Lines of the Nove0 120 Section Three: Literature as Ideological Form I I Literature as Ideological Form (Bakhtin/Medvedev) 123 12 Critique of Formalism (Bakhtin/Medvedev) 135 13 Constructing a Sociological Poetics (Voloshinov/Bakhtin) 160 14 Genres as Ideological Forms (Bakhtin/Medvedev) 174 15 Aesthetic Visualizing of Time/Space: The Chronotope (Bakhtin) 180 16 The Serio-Comical Tradition of the Menippea (Bakhtin) 187 Section Four: Carnival Ambivalence 17 Folk Humour and Carnival Laughter (Bakhtin) 194 18 Carnival Ambivalence: Laughter; Praise and Abuse (Bakhtin) 206 19 The Banquet the Body and the Underworld (Bakhtin) 226 vi The BakhtinReader A Glossary of Key Terms 245 Bibliography 253 Index 257 Acknowledgements I should like to thank the many friends and colleagues whose enthusiasm, suggestions and discussions have contributed to this book. In particular, I am grateful to Professor Ken Newton for his helpful reading of my introduc tion. Graham Roberts has provided far more than the glossary; he has been an unfailing source of information and dialogue. Like all readers of the English editions of these texts, I am immensely indebted to the scholarly work of all the editors and translators involved. I have greatly appreciated the encouragement and support of Christopher Wheeler at Edward Arnold throughout this project. The editor and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material in this book: Academic Press, Inc., for permission to reprint from Freudianism: A Critical Sketch by V. N. Volosinov, translated by I. R. Titunik and edited in collaboration with Neal H. Bruss (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987), copyright © 1976 by Academic Press, Inc., and from Marxism and the Philosophy of Language by V. N. Volosinov, translated by ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), copyright© 1973 by Academic Press, Inc. The Johns Hopkins University Press for extracts from The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship By M. M. Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev, translated by Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). The University of Minnesota Press for permission to reprint extracts from Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by Caryl Emerson, copyright 1984 by the University of Minnesota. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. The MIT Press for permission to reprint extracts from Rabelais and His World by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by Helen lswolsky (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984), copyright© 1968 by the MIT Press. The University of Texas Press for extracts from 'Discourse in the Novel,' pp. 259-422 and 'Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,' pp. 3-40, reprinted from The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press), copyright © 1981, and extracts from 'The Problem of Speech Genres,' pp. 50-100, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, viii The Bakhtin Reader Tex.: University of Texas Press), copyright © 1986. By permission of the University of Texas Press. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material produced in this book. Any rights not acknowledged here will be acknowledged in subsequent printings if notice is given to the publisher. Introduction I Perhaps what is most striking about the work of Mikhail Bakhtin is the diver sity of areas and range of disciplines across which it is invoked. His ideas are being utilized not just in literary studies but also in philosophy, semi otics, cultural studies, anthropology, feminist and post-colonial studies, Marxism, ethics and, of course, Russian and Slavic studies. Apart from the accessibility of his ideas, there are two main reasons for this. At the centre of all his thinking is an innovative and dynamic perception of language. Due largely to the impact of structuralist linguistics and subsequent development of deconstructionist theory, a concern with language as production of mean ing has been pushed to the centre of twentieth-century Western epistomol ogy. In addition, because of the troubled history of Russia this century, Bakhtin's thought remained almost unknown there or in the West until rela tively recently. He is thus, by accident, a relative late-comer to the field and his emphasis upon language as actual utterances, as discourse, 1 and his rejection of a structuralist view of language as a monolithic conceptual sys tem seem to offer the potential of moving beyond the current theoretic impasse.2 So far I have referred only to the name of Bakhtin. It is an irony, much commented on, that the body of texts, represented in this Reader, articulat ing some of the most influential thinking about questions of authoring and meaning in language, are themselves the subject of scholarly and political dispute. This dispute involves two separate issues. Because of the social and political conditions in Russia, most of Bakhtin's work was only pub lished many years after it was written, quite a bit of it posthumously, and some of his texts have been lost completely. The other issue is, perhaps, even more painful. In 1973 it was suddenly claimed that texts written during the 1920s and signed by men who were no longer alive had been written largely by Bakhtin. At the present time, most of these uncertainties and dis putes appear unresolvable. 1 The Russian 'slovo' used by Bakhtin can also signify an individual word; it always implies a word or words as they are uttered, not language in the abstract. See Glossary. ' By this I mean .the general recognition that structuralism, for all its achievements, has not fulfilled earlier hopes of providing a full account of linguistic structure and functioning. Similarly, deconstructionist dismantling of the fundamental assumptions of Western thought seems unable to provide any basis for a positive move beyond that critique. 2 The Bakhtin Reader What is beyond doubt is that all three men, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895--1975), Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891-1938) and Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov ( 1884/5--1936) lived actual historical lives, met and discussed ideas together as members of like-minded intellectual circles at Nevel,3 then Vitebsk and finally Leningrad during the heady post-revolution ary years in Russia from around 1918 to 1928. These were years of intense intellectual and artistic creativity in the Soviet Union but with Stalin's consol idation of personal power in the 1920s they became increasingly dangerous ones. In 1929 Bakhtin was arrested and, eventually, on account of very poor health, received a commuted sentence of six years' exile in the town of Kustanai in Soviet Central Asia. Unlike Bakhtin, who never obtained a remunerative or established position within official cultural or academic cir cles (a factor which may well have contributed to his survival), Medvedev pursued a quite successful public career in literary and theatrical spheres until 1938 when, suddenly, he was arrested in one of the recurrent purges and shot. Voloshinov also pursued a fairly successful academic career as a senior research worker at the State Institute for Speech Culture. However, he had been ill since 1914 with tuberculosis from which he died in 1936. None of Medvedev's or Voloshinov's publications on language, Freudianism and literature during the 1920s made much impact at the time they appeared, and were subsequently ignored. The only exception was Roman Jakobson's utilization of some of the ideas in Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.