Customer Reviews

The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book consists of four essays of Bakhtin's "Middle Period", two short and two longer works which have been arranged, according to complexity, with the most accessible essay first and the most difficult last. Cooincidentally, this is also the reverse order in which they were written. None of these essays were avaiable in English before the present translation/compilation by Emerson and Holquist, and judging from its many reprintings (the 10th by 1996), quotations and misquotations, and various interpretations, it is the most influential of Bakhtin's works.

Some brief notes on the four Essays:

1. "Epic and Novel" dated 1941 - A rather straightforward comparison of the Novel and the Epic. Its aim is to show the distinctiveness of the Novel. This can be seen as a transitional essay between the Chronotope Essay and the Bildungsroman Fragment. It is well organized and introduces several characteristics unique to the novel such as three-dimensionality, imagery and openendedness.

2. "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" dated 1940 - This is in essence a brief history of the novel according to Bakhtin. It concentrates on style, theory and as the title states, discourse, beginning with Greek works and going to the Renaissance. Conceptually this is strikingly similar to Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis". This essay is incomplete.

3. "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel" dated 1937-38 - Another long (175 page) discussion on the distinctiveness of the novel. The concept of the Chronotope is introduced simply as "time space" and the essay seeks to show its use from the Greek Romance to the novel of the 19th Century. Bakhtin inserts here also a discussion of the "Rabelaisian Chrontope", the role of the clown, etc. Special emphasis is also given to the Blidungsroman. This essay, it seems to me, is essentially, Bakhtin's own favorite Reading list in which he experiments with his own concept of Chronotope, skillfully fitting it to each work. Despite its digressions it is basically a chronological presentation.

4. "Discourse in the Novel" dated 1934-35 - Another lengthy essay which is in essence Bakhtin's discussion of his philosophy of language. This essay also seems to be unfinished. It consists of five distinct parts in which Bakhtin experiments with different approaches to discourse in the novel. As is often the case with Bakhtin, this essay is also open-ended.

I find this compliation of four essays to be most stimulating. It seems to be well translated and edited. Ample footnotes assist the reader with Bakhtin's many, sometimes obscure, literary references. In my opinion, particularly the last two essays, constitute Baktin's most important work on the novel. Those expecting distinct conclusions and theories will be disappointed, because this is not the aim here at all. Bakhtin instead provides many different starting points from which to continue the study of the novel. This is, for example, what makes the chronotope indefinable, because it is constantly changing. I highly recommend this surprisingly accessible book. I believe that it is, along with "Speech Genres and other late Essays" Bakhtin's most important work on the novel.

I was introduced the Bakhtin, by way of this book, in my grad literary theory course. I found him at the time to be a long-winded individual who took 200 pages to say what could have been said in 50. How wrong I was.

I've since become very enamored of Bakhtin's ideas and I think now that this collection was a wonderful place to start. Yes, Bakhtin is demanding but once you step up to the challenge you will find yourself rewarded beyond your wildest dreams.

The key to this whole collection is the final essay, Discourse in the Novel. This is perhaps his most influential work and it contains some very interesting ideas about the novel, the definition of language and how labguages interact with one another. I would not recommend that a newcomer to Bakhtin start here. If you pick up this volume start with the first essay, Epic and Novel, and go from there. The writing gets progressively more dense and the ideas build on each other so you'll be quite lost (like I was) if you try to tackle Discourse first.

This volume consists of four lengthy selections from Bakhtin's work on the theory and "prehistory" of the novel. The introduction by editor Michael Holquist is helpful, but the essays themselves are theoretically dense and demanding. This is a rewarding volume for serious students of Bakhtin or of the Theory of the Novel, but "Speech Genres & Other Late Essays" (ed. Emerson & Holquist) is a better introduction to Bakhtin's theories of language and literature.

Bakhtin is quite a character, and much more accessible as a writer than the reviewer below might suggest in this volume. He has been regarded as the most important theorist of the novel, perhaps ever. But when he celebrates "the novel," it is not always obvious if he's discussing actual novels, an idea ubernovel, or a quality that is novel. I prefer the latter interpretation, but all three are possible.

The crown jewel of this collection of essays is the third one, on the crhonotope. Here, Bakhtin inquires into what amounts to genres of being in narrative space and time. The vampire's lair, the old western saloon, the medieval castle... These chronotopes circulate around in our heads, and can get dangerous if you try to actualize them in the wrong way. Bakhtin himself experienced the horrors of the Stalinist version of the Worker's Paradise chronotope. Enter "the novel", the potential for nongeneric being, open-ended action. That's freedom, no?

Meanwhile, it's great fun to inquire into how the chronotopes in your neighborhood operate, and perhaps to unpack them. Ideals in the U.S. about how a "perfect American" may move and have his/her being might be a good place to start, assuming introspection is not yet so unpatriotic as to become illegal yet...

Bakhtin arguably at his best. Sure the final essay in the volume is not an easy read, but if you think Bakhtin is hard to read try Heidegger when he grooves along with his own lingo. Bakhtin's key idea of contextual language and the many voicedness of novels against the backdrop of an author's voice and that of his times is prehaps the sum total of what the novel as a genre is. In fact, the novel is not quite a genre but an ongoing process that escapes ossification as it changes with the times. Wonderfully done.

What made Bakhtin worth quoting on laughter as a form of cognition in a closeness that is inside out, upside down, and dismembers what we have become used to is contained in Epic and Novel, the first essay in this book. I quote:

Of special significance in this process of demolishing distance is the comical origin of these genres: they derive from folklore (popular laughter). It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance. As a distanced image a subject cannot be comical; it must be brought close. Everything that makes us laugh is close at hand, all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity. Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. As it draws an object to itself and makes it familiar, laughter delivers the object into the fearless hands of investigative experiment--both scientific and artistic--and into the hands of free experimental fantasy. Familiarization of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making possible free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization. (p. 23).

I wish amazon had a separate place to submit Kindle reviews, or those reviews just about the operation of the Kindle for a specific book.

Until then, I want to add that this book does not allow for chapter searches. I needed the last chapter, and I had to click "Search This Book," then type in the name of the chapter ("Discourse in the Novel"), and then weed through 14 pages of citations to find the place I was looking for.

Until this book becomes more Kindle-friendly, I'd recommend buying the paper version.

Excellent condition.Excellent translation of Bakhtin whose writing is a Russian take on phenomenology. In the Dialogic Imagination he considers ficition writing--I enjoyed discovering his analysis of the "road" or journey.

this supplier made the process exceptionally easy. The book came in very good condition and on time. The book itself may be considered a difficult read due to the nature of Bakhtin's language, but, overall this text has been very helpful in relation to my lit classes.