The dialogic imagination: four essaysThese 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. |
What people are saying - Write a review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - lalaland - LibraryThingBakhtin has some interesting thoughts. Used this book to support thesis in college regarding the small-town chornotope in Stephen King's novels. Read full review
Review: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series)
User Review - MsKim - Goodreadsbakhtin is awesome. loving it so far. Read full review
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
absolute past abstract adventure adventure-time alien already ancient Apuleius artistic aspects authentic Bakhtin Baroque novel basic become boundaries character characteristic chivalric romance chronotope comic completely concept concrete consciousness context course created culture death direct distinctive Don Quixote double-voiced elements epic everyday example expression family novel folkloric forms gay deception genres Greek romance guage hero heteroglossia heteroglot historical human hybrid ideological idyll important individual intentions internal dialogism laughter Leucippe and Clitophon linguistic literary language literature living macaronic material means Menippean satire motifs nature novelistic novelistic discourse novelistic prose object one's organic parody pathos person picaresque novel plane play plot poetic point of view precisely purely Rabelais reality relationship represented rhetorical role semantic sense significance social spatial speaking specific structure style stylization temporal theme tion tradition ture unity utterance various verbal voice whole world view zone