The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin

by Emerson, Caryl

• ISBN13: 9780691050492
• ISBN10: 069105049X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-03-13
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Among Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ideological spectrum, from old-fashioned humanist to structuralist to postmodernist. In this candid assessment of his place in Russian and Western thought, Caryl Emerson brings to light what might be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader: Bakhtin's foundational ideas, forged in the early revolutionary years, yet hardly altered in his lifetime. With the collapse of the Soviet system, a truer sense of Bakhtin's contribution may now be judged in the context of its origins and its contemporary Russian "reclamation." A foremost Bakhtin authority, Caryl Emerson mines extensive Russian sources to explore Bakhtin's reception in Russia, from his earliest publication in 1929 until his death, and his posthumous rediscovery. After a reception-history of Bakhtin's published work, she examines the role of his ideas in the post-Stalinist revival of the Russian literary profession, concentrating on the most provocative rethinkings of three major concepts in his world: dialogue and polyphony; carnival; and "outsideness," a position Bakhtin considered essential to both ethics and aesthetics. Finally, she speculates on the future of Bakhtin's method, which was much more than a tool of criticism: it will "tell you how to teach, write, live, talk, think."

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Abbreviations	xiii
Introduction East Meets West in the Ex-USSR	3	(26)
PART ONE: BAKHTIN STUDIES, BAKHTINISTICS, BAKHTINOLOGY	29	(94)
The Russians Reclaim Bakhtin, 1975 to the Jubilee	31	(42)
The Three Worlds of Mikhail Bakhtin	35	(4)
The Post-Stalinist Revival of the Russian Literary Profession	39	(9)
The 1990s: The Russian Bakhtin Industry Takes Stock	48	(25)
Retrospective: Domestic Reception during Bakhtin's Life	73	(50)
Dostoevsky, I (1929)	75	(9)
Dostoevsky, II (1963)	84	(9)
Rabelais and Folk Culture	93	(14)
The 1975 Anthology: Essays on the Novel	107	(13)
Posthumous: The First Manuscripts and Final Essays	120	(3)
PART TWO: LITERATURE FADES, PHILOSOPHY MOVES TO THE FORE (REWORKING THREE PROBLEMATIC AREAS)	123	(142)
Polyphony, Dialogism, Dostoevsky	127	(35)
Can Polyphony Exist? If So, Does It Apply?	130	(4)
Unsympathetic Case Studies and Suspicious Close Readings	134	(15)
``The Torments of Dialogue'': In Defense of Bakhtin	149	(13)
Carnival: Open-ended Bodies and Anachronistic Histories	162	(45)
Pro: Carnival as Incarnation, Eucharist, Sacral Myth	172	(7)
Contra: Demonization, Stalinization	179	(16)
Neither For nor Against: Carnival as Analytic Device	195	(12)
``Outsideness'' as the Ethical Dimension of Art (Bakhtin and the Aesthetic Moment)	207	(58)
Belatedly Finding a Place for the Very Early Bakhtin	208	(12)
Outsideness: What It Is and Is Not	220	(22)
The Problem of Form	242	(8)
The Logic of Aesthetic Form and ``Consummation as a Type of Dying''	250	(15)
Afterword One Year Later: The Prospects for Bakhtin's [inonauka], of ``Science in Some Other Way''	265	(24)
Index	289