The Dialogic Imagination
The Dialogic Imagination
Four Essays
These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)—known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky—as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.
Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.
This magnificently edited and translated volume can be the beginning of a dialogue that will go beyond the monographic works of Bakhtin available in English up to now.
We are only now realizing, 20 years after the first English language translation of his work, that Bakhtin is one of the giants of 20th century social and cultural theory.
Returning us to an art of possibilities, not of answers, Bakhtin's dialogic imagination resembles a dialectical wrestling match with no referee and no winner. In the empyrean of literary theory, it's exactly what we need, now and then.
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Translation
- Introduction
- Epic and Novel
- From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse
- Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel
- Discourse in the Novel
- Glossary
- Index
