Rather, a novel is an orchestration of heteroglossia, a dialogization of linguistic multiplicity, of cultures, worldviews and ideologies a system of double-voiced images of languages. If we can be banal-and I will only be banal in this Review anything more would require a work of exposition beyond my means today-a novel is not merely “a work of prose of a certain length” or an assemblage of plot and character. All discussions of what a novel is, how it works, how it arranges its materials and creates its effects must begin with Bakhtin. While Aristotle’s Poetics provides us with a theory of tragic drama (his legendary work on comedy is at best a lost work) Bakhtin provides us with a fundamental theory of the novel. If we can be banal-and I will only be banal in this Review anything more would require a work of exposition beyond my means today-a novel is not me Bakhtin is our Aristotle of the novel. 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.moreīakhtin is our Aristotle of the novel. 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. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.īakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. 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 Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), publ 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.
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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.