Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (November 17, 1895 – March 7,1975), a Russian philosopher and literary scholar, wrote influential works in literary theory and literary criticism.

Biography

Bakhtin was born in Oriel, Russia outside of Moscow to a middle class family. His father was the manager of a bank and Bakhtin grew up in Vilnius and Odessa until he moved to Petrograd to study at the university there in 1913. Bakhtin completed his studies in 1918, but the civil war that raged throughout that time made settling in the capital impossible. He moved first to Nevel and then to Vitebsk where he worked as a school teacher. An intellectual circle formed around him including Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev. It was during this period that he married, and contracted osteomyelitis in his leg, an illness which hampered his productivity, and rendered him an invalid.

In 1924, Bakhtin considered Russia's situation sufficiently calm to move to Leningrad, where he struggled financially as his illness and lack of acceptable Stalinist credentials made finding employment difficult. His position deteriorated even further in 1929, when he was swept up in one of the many purges of artists and intellectuals Stalin conducted during the early years of his reign. Bakhtin was accused of participating in the Russian Orthodox Church's underground movements — a charge whose truthfulness is not clear even today. Bakhtin was sentenced to exile in Siberia but appealed on the grounds that, in his weakened state, it would kill him. Instead, he was sentenced to six years of 'internal exile' in Kazakhstan.

Throughout the 1930s Bakhtin remained in Kazakhstan, first as a bookkeeper on a collective farm and then, in 1936, in Mordovia State Teacher's College in Saransk. An obscure figure in a provincial college, he dropped out of view and taught on and off in Saransk, periodically moving to even more remote villages to escape further purges. In 1938, his osteomyelitis had become bad enough to require leg amputation. His health subsequently improved, and he became more prolific. In 1941 he submitted the manuscript of his project on Rabelais — now published as Rabelais and His World — to the Gorky Institute of World Literature. The book's earthy, anarchic topic caused a scandal and Bakhtin was granted a lesser degree instead of a full doctorate. After World War II, he returned to teach in Saransk, where he continued to teach until his death in 1975.

In the post-Stalinist period of the late 1950s, Russian scholars rediscovered Bakhtin's work, and his fame quickly grew. Even more surprising to them was the fact that he was still alive. In his later life Bakhtin was lionized by Soviet intellectuals and he continued to write. After his death in 1975 authors such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov brought Bakhtin to the attention of the Francophone world, and from there his popularity in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries continued to grow. In the late 1980s Bakhtin's work experienced a surge of popularity in the West, and he continues today to be regarded as one of the most important theorists of literature and culture to have written in the twentieth century.

Bakhtin's work and ideas

First Period

As a literary theorist, Bakhtin is usefully compared with Russian Formalists, as well as with the work of Yuri Lotman. His career is often described as being broken into four periods. During the 1920s, Bakhtin's work tended to focus on ethics and aesthetics in general. Early pieces such as Towards a Philosophy of the Act and Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity are indebted to the philosophical trends of the time that Bakhtin followed as a student — particularly the Marburg School Neo-Kantianism of Max Scheler and, to a lesser extent, Nicolai Hartmann.

Second Period: Problems of Dostoeyvsky's Poetics

The second period of his thought — most closely associated with his time in Leningrad — includes a shift towards the notion of dialogue and dialogism, particularly at it relates to his engagement with the work of Dostoevsky. He compiled these notions into his Problems of Dostoevsky's Oeuvre (1929), later republished as Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1963). This text had the effect of helping to rehabilitate the critical view of Dostoevsky as an author and artist. Dostoevsky had been considered many things: religious prophet, pre-Freudian psychologist and existentialist philosopher. But as a novelist, his style was considered messy, lacking any real artistic merit. Bakhtin gave the world a language for discussing the features of Dostoevsky's artistic vision.

First among these is his notion of an unfinalizable self: characters in Dostoevskyare always to be understood as works in progress. They cannot be finalized or completely known or labeled. They are always open to the penetration of the "word" of the "other." These terms of technical terms in Bakhtin's thought. The Russian word "slovo," like the Greek "logos" can be translated as both word and discourse. Bakhtin's thought plays with the "dialogical" implications of "the word." Dostoevsky's novels are dialogic because his characters are not finalizable; they are always subject to the interpenetration of the word (or idea) of the other. Thus, the word of the other becomes an important component of what is traditionally understood as "the self."

Bakhtin addresses this point in an interview prior to his death: "In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others." (New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993) As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on a self: not just in terms of how a person comes to be, but even in how a person thinks and how a person sees oneself truthfully.

Dostoevsky's polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is, the voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.

Some have found in this conception the idea of a soul; Bakhtin had strong roots in Christianity and in the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann Cohen, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual's potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul.

Another key idea from this period is the notion of the "carnival", and "carnivalization." Particularly important in his interpretation of Rabelais, this notion in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish, and interact together. This concept is the dominant concept associated with Bakhtin as a literary theorist, whereas the above concepts relate more to an overall philosophy. The carnival was Bakhtin's way of describing

Third Period: Dialogism, Heteroglossia, Chronotope

Works from his third period during his exile include some of the key concepts associated with Bakhtin's works today, including dialogism, heteroglossia (многоязычие), and chronotope. His work on Rabelais, also associated with this period, focuses on the notion of the carnivalesque. Finally, his later work focuses not so much on the novel, but on problems of method and the nature of culture, concerns exemplified by the volume 'Speech Genres and Other Late Essays'.

Disputed texts

Famously, some of the works which bear the names of Bakhtin's close friends Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev have been attributed to Bakhtin — particularly The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and Marxism and Philosophy of Language. These claims originated in the early 1970s and received their earliest full articulation in English in Clark and Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin. In the twenty years since then, however, most scholars have come to agree that Voloshinov and Medvedev ought to be considered the authors of these works. Although Bakhtin influenced these scholars and he (and others) may have had a hand in composing the works attributed to them, it now seems clear that if it was necessary to attribute authorship of these works to one person, Voloshinov and Medvedev respectively should receive credit.

Glossary of some key terms

Chronotope

Literally "time-space." A unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented. The distinctiveness of this concept as opposed to most other uses of time and space in literary analysis lies in the fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent. The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring.

Dialogism

Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole;mdashthere is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be no actual monologue. One may, like a primitive tribe that knows only its own limits, be deluded into thinking there is one language, or one may, as grammarians, certain political figures and normative framers of "literary languages" do, seek in a sophisticated way to achieve a unitary language. In both cases the unitariness is relative to the overpowering force of heteroglossia, and thus dialogism.

Dialogue

Dialogue and its various processes are central to Bakhtin's theory, and it is precisely as verbal process (participial modifiers) that theri force is most accurately sensed. A word, discourse, language or culture undergoes "dialogization" when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things. Undialogized language is authoritative or absolute. Dialogue may be external (between two different people) or internal (between an earlier and a later self). Yuri Lotman (in The Structure of the Artistic Text) distinguishes these two types of dialogue as respectively spatial and temporal communication acts.

Discourse

The Russian word (slovo) covers much more territory than its English equivalent, signifying both an individual word and a method of using words (cf. the Greek logos) that presumes a type of authority. ...what interests Bakhtin is the sort of talk novelistic environments make possible , and how this type of talking threatens other more closed systems. Bakhtin at times uses discourse as it is sometimes used in the West;mdashas a way to refer to the subdivisions determined by social and ideological differences within a single language (i.e., the discourse of American plumbers vs. that of American academics). But it is more often than not his diffuse way of insisting on the primacy of speech, utterance, all in praesentia aspects of language.

Heteroglossia

The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of condition;mdashsocial, historical, meteorilogical, physiological;mdashthat will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to resolve.

Voice

This is the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness. A voice always has a will or desire behind it, its own timbre and overtones. Single-voiced discourse is the dream of poets; double-voiced discourse the realm of the novel. At several points Bakhtin illustrates the difference between these categories by moving language-units from one plane to the other;mdashfor example, shifting a trope from the plane of poetry to the plane of prose: both poetic and prose tropes are ambiguous but a poetic trope, while meaning more than one thing, is always only single-voiced. Prose tropes by contrast always contain more than one voice, and are therefore dialogized.

Major works

• Toward a Philosophy of the Act
• Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics (1929)
• Rabelais and His World (1968)
• The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin
• Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Sources and further reading

• Mikhail Bakhtin: A Biography. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist. Harvard University Press, 1984
• Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Ken Hirschkop. Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson. Stanford University Press, 1990.
• Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Second Edition. Michael Holquist. Routledge, 2002.

See also

Pavel Medvedev

Valentin Voloshinov

External links

• The Bakhtin Circle, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Bakhtin Centre (University of Sheffield)
• A Bakhtin profile (James P. Zappen)
• Another Bakhtin profile (Vincent Hevern)
• Bakhtin Timeline

de:Michail Michailowitsch Bachtin es:Mijail Bajtín fr:Mikhaïl Bakhtine he:מיכאל בכטין hu:Mihail Mihajlovics Bahtyin pt:Mikhail Bakhtin ru:Бахтин, Михаил Михайлович zh:巴赫汀

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