Speech Genres and Other Late Essays M. M. BAKHTIN
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Speech Genres and Other Late Essays M. M. BAKHTIN Translated by Vern W. McGee Edited by CarylEmerson and MichaelH olquist l!NIVERSITI' OF TEXAS PRESS, Al1STIN Copyright© 1986 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition, 1986 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819. library of Congrrss Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895-1975. Speech genres and other late essays. (University of Texas Press Slavic series ; no. 8) Translation of: Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva. Includes bibliographies and index. 1. Philology. I. Holquist, Michael, 1935- 11. Emerson, Caryl. Ill. Title. IV. Series. P49.BZ813 1986 410 86-11399 ISBN O-Z9Z-7Z046-7 ISBN O-Z9Z-7Z560-1 (pbk.) D :J_ 0 ..A ") .A Co ntents ' Note on Translation VII Introduction by Michael Holquist IX Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff I The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) /0 The Problem of Speech Genres 60 The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis /03 From Notes Made in 1970-71 /32 To ward a Methodology fo r the Human Sciences 159 Index 173 Note on Translation This translation has benefited a great deal from being among the last rather than the first translations of Bakhtin's work. I have been able to take advantage of the careful consideration previous translators have given to many of the problematic terms and concepts that are so plen tiful in Bakhtin's theory. In most cases I have borrowed the terms used in previous translations in the Slavic Series, such as "heteroglossia" (raznorechie), "speech" (rech ), and "discourse" (slovo), among others, not only fo r the sake of consistency throughout the series but because I believe they are good choices. The essays offe red in this volume also contain many of their own perplexing words and concepts, such as "outsideness" (vnenakhodi most), which have never before appeared in translation-or in Russian for that matter. On these I have consulted with both native Russian speakers and recognized Bakhtin scholars. In each case the options were weighed carefully, and the one most appropriate in style and tone as well as the closest in meaning was chosen. With respect to style, I believe these essays show Bakhtin at his most Bakhtinian. The rough, unfinishedqualit y that comes through in his previously translated work is even more in evidence here, because most of these essays were not actually prepared by Bakhtin for pub lication. They show more the process of his thought than the final product. I have attempted to convey this quality in the translation. The transliteration system is a modificationof the International Pho netic Alphabet: those letters requiring a hachek have been changed to the variants that use the letter "h"-"zh," "ch," "sh," "shch"; the IPA "c" is rendered as "ts" and the "x" as "kh." Proper names are rendered as they ordinarily are or would be spelled in English (e.g., Tolstoy, Dostoevsky). V. W. MeG. Introductio n "To strive at lzig/ler matlzematical formulas for linguistic meaning while knowing not/zing correctly of tlze shirt-sleeve rudiments of language is to court disaster." Benjamin Lee Whorf, "Linguistics as an Exact Science," 1941 ". there can be neither a firstnor a last meaning; fanything that can be understood] always exists among other meanings as a link in tlze chain of meaning, wlziclz in its totality is tlze only thing tlzat can be real. In lzistorica/ /ife this chain continues infinitely, and therefore eaclz individual /ink in it is renewed again and again, as though it werebeing reborn." M. M. Bakhtin, "From Notes Made in 1970-71" The first recognition in the United States of Bakhtin's status as a major thinker came in 1968, when he was included among a group of inter nationally known theoreticians contributing to a volume of Yale French Studies on the topic "Game, Play, Literature." 1 The identification of Bakhtin provided in the notes on contributors has an unmistakable diffidence about it: "M. Bakhtin ...is reaching the end of a long ca reer, but only recently have the boldness of his speculation and the breadth of his ideas been appreciated outside the restricted circle of his Russian friends and colleagues." Less than a mere two decades later, Bakhtin is being hailed as "the most important Soviet thinker in the human sciences and the greatest theoretician of literature in the twentieth century." z And in March 1985, the executive director of the Modern Language Association announced a "trend-spotting contest to PMLA readers ... I will offer [a prize] to the first reader to locate the earliest mention in PMI.A of any of the fo llowing: Bakhtin, Barthes, Derrida, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Karl Marx."-' In the great market place of ideas, Bakhtin has obviously risen very high. It is, however, a curious fact that of all the names listed in PM LA's roster of trends, Bakhtin is surely still the least known, if only in the sense that much of his work is still unavailable in English translation. Although deceased, he is similar to the still living figures with whom Introduction his name is so often conjoined, fo r in his case as in theirs we lack a «.:omplctc canon of finished works. He is a figure very much still in the process of becoming who he will be. There can be no question, then, of "introducing" Bakhtin at this point in his unfolding. But before de scribing each of these essays individually, we may briefly ponder the effect they may have as they appear in English fo r the first time. In Bakhtin's thought the place from which we speak plays an impor tant role in determining what we say. A little uneasy, then, about the place from which I myself speak, I suggest that Bakhtin has achieved the degree of eminence at which those who invoke his name can be divided into a number of different camps or schools. There are those who have responded to him primarily as a literary critic; others have seen him as social thinker; still others value him as a philosopher of language (and , of course, these shadings tend to blend into each other in any specificappr opriation of Bakhtin). But increasingly a suspicion is beginning to dawn that his work may best (or at least most compre hensively) be thought of as philosophy of another kind, a philosophy across the boards: he is being perceived as belonging to a tradition of systematic philosophy of a sort that did not automatically equate "sys tem" with "method" as we do now. Since the time of Kant, we have with ever increasing insistence perceived system as a closed order rather than as an open-ended series of connections. System for Kant meant not only the rigorous application of a fully worked out and abso lutely coherent set of categories. System also implied that no major question should be treated in isolation: thus, any consideration of rea son had to answer demands not only of logic or epistemology, but of ethics and aesthetics as well. It is in this latter sense only that Ba khtin's thought might be labeled systematic: the sense he seeks to i n voke " when he calls-as in these pages he so frequently does-for an open unity." These essays, then, will provide new confirmation and <tues tions fo r each of the rapidly emerging Bakhtinian tendencies. But since most of the essays come from very late in 8akhtin's activity, at a point when he was again meditating the global questions that had sparked lively debate during the "philosophical evenings" of h is youth, they will deepen awareness of Bakhtin's status as a thinker. For these essays are all attempts to think various specific topics in light of the more comprehensive categories we usually associate with philosophy. The collection of Bakhtin's essays in this book first appeared to gether in a volume called Estetila slovesnogo I'Uorrlte.ri'Ua (Aesthetics of verbal creativity) published in Moscow in 1979. The book was edited Introduction ..; xi by two highly respected scholars: Sergey Averintsev (born 1937), a philosopher and historian admired by Bakhtin; and Sergey Bocharov (born 1927), a literary critic who was particularly close to Bakhtin dur ing the last years of his life. The 1979 anthology was similar to a collection of Bakhtin's essays that had been published in 1975 (translated into English as Th e Dialogic Imagination);4 in both, the pieces included came from different periods in the author's long life; and in neither were the essays organized around any single, unified theme. The reason fo r such apparently ca sual editing was in both cases the same: the editors, aware of how quickly publishing conditions can change in the Soviet Union, were eager to get as much of Bakhtin into print as they could while they could. Aesthetics of Ve rbalCre ativity, then, contained pieces written in Bakhtin's first phase and in his last. It included the first essay Bakhtin ever published, "Art and Answerability," which appeared in 1919 when he was a young man of twenty-four, but it also contained what is probably the last thing he wrote before his death in 1975, "Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences." The later, less patently philo sophical pieces here are mostly devoted to questions of what linguists now call "pragmatics," including excerpts from unpublished manu scripts devoted to literature and essays on the distinctiveness of the human sciences among other fo rms of knowledge.