Customer Reviews

Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics

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

 

 

The works of Mikhail Bakhtin which are presently available in English are quite uneven because of subject matter, different translators and translations, and because only some were meant to be published by Bakhtin himself. Also Bakhtin's focus and interpretation changed from his early writing to late in his career, thus creating conflicts. The whole of Bakhtin's work is well analyzed by Morson and Emerson in this coherent and comprehensive study. This is not an easy task. The Key Concepts are interpreted as being: Prosaics, Unfinalizabilty and Dialogue and are discussed in Part One. Part Two deals with the Problems of Authorship. Part Three, is in my opinion the most important, and is the Discussion of Theories of the Novel. Of particular interest here is the discussion of the Chronotope and its relation to the Bildungsroman and sense of becoming. As Bakhtin himself never defined the term "Chronotope", the authors here explore its relationship to Bakhtin's Bildngsroman fragment, and the concept of Time in the development of the Bildungsroman. They are correct in this assessment, but do not carry the idea far enough. In order to really understand Bakhtin one must read the books he cites from this genre. No study of Bakhtin seems to have done so thus far.

This book is useful to both readers fammilar with Bakhtin's work, or to those who want to use it as an introduction. Highly recommended.

You can find a very detailed analysis on Bakhtin's work. Very complete work and an amazing reference for anyone interested in Bakhtin's literature analysis and theories. There is also a very useful glossary at the end of the book that allows you to find different terms and their applications in several contexts.

Literature triumphs over being mere words on the page when it gives rise to critics whose view of complexity rivals that of modern philosophers. This book attempts to provide a point of view which even faults philosophy for its view of morality.

Bakhtin begins his critique of Kant's reliance on imperatives and moral norms from this very point: a sense of obligation or "oughtness" (dolzhestvovanie) must be grounded in the concrete instance, not in the general rule or the abstractly hypothetical situation. Bakhtin even insists at one point that there are "no moral norms signifying in themselves," but only the "moral subject with his specific structuring . . . upon which one must rely" (KFP, p. 85). (p. 69).

But even the great Kant only gets four lines on page 515 in the Index (pp. 501-530) of this book about Mikhail Bakhtin, far less than the lines devoted to entries for Carnival, Chronotope, Creativity, Dialogue, Dostoevsky, Double-voicing, Ethics, Form-shaping ideology (force, impulse), Freud, Future and futurity, Genre, Global concepts, Heteroglossia, Historicity, Hybrids, Image of a person, Inner speech, Interpretation, Intonation and tone, Laughter, Literary history, Marx, Memory, Monologic and monologism, Novels, Outsideness, Parody, Past and pastness, Plot, Poetry, Polyphony, Potential, Present and presentness, Privacy and private life, Prosaics, Psychology as discipline, Rabelais, Reaccentuation and accentuation, Relativism, Responsibility, Self and psyche, Space, Speech genres, Structuralism and structure, Style, System, Task or project, Testing of a hero, Testing of a language or genre: of style in double-voiced discourse, Theoretism, Third person: as superaddressee, Time, Tolstoy, Truth, Unfinalizability, Unity, Utopianism and anti-utopianism, Utterance, Value and evaluation, Voice and voicing, Voloshinov, Wholeness, and Word.

On the only page which mentions Nietzsche, he is considered symptomatic of the mistake made by anyone who apotheosizes philosophers:

The major philosophical challenge of our time, Bakhtin writes, is not to appreciate the abstract value of time, space, or morality, but to resist the temptations of the theoretical and abstract. One must rescue the "I" from the realm of infinite and purely abstract meaning--what Bakhtin calls the world of cognition--and so free it for genuine responsibility (otvetstvennost'). What is most important about a given act, then, is the fact that I "sign" it. Bakhtin insists that this concept, if properly understood, is neither solipsistic nor selfish; Nietzsche's big mistake, in fact, was to assume that living from oneself meant living for oneself (KFP, p. 119). Signing an act does not mean accepting all blame or assuming absolute control over it. Rather, signing is that indispensable enabling gesture that makes it possible for morality to coalesce around a human being, in what Bakhtin calls the "architectonics" of a life. The abstract and "projective" side of things, which theorists identify . . . (p. 69).

Scholastic discussions of philosophical texts treat ideas like abstractions which make the ideal Platonic forms more important than human potential to accomplish anything, which philosophers have rarely been inspired to attempt. Heidegger's support for Hitler is widely considered an example of how erroneously a thinker in a confusing place and time is likely to apply human needs to justify going off on the wrong track by attempting to work within a destructive system, but this book is more concerned with the situation in the Stalinist Soviet Union or even in the book WAR AND PEACE. In the explanation of abbreviations, KFP stands for "K filosofii postupka" [Toward a philosophy of the act]. (p. xviii). The list of contents on pages ix-xii ends with a list of Charts for six places in the text a semiotic square or outline of book contents for Bakhtin's 1929 book on Dostoevsky, or for classifications of novels which ends with Bakhtin's main concern, novels of historical emergence, impressively summarize his thought in outline form.

Chapter 4, (pp. 123-171), Metalinguistics: The Dialogue of Authorship, provides a view of the aims of literature that comes before the discussion of psychology in this book. In opposition to a ready-made world, literature seeks to create. "But in fact the object is created in the process of creativity, as are the poet himself, his world view, and his means of expression. [PT, p. 120] (p. 171). Just as utterances are unrepeatable, so actions can be performed once and only once by a given person (KFP, p. 112). Neither speech nor ethical action can ever be merely an instantiation of rules. (p. 171). PT stands for:

"The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis." In M. M. Bakhtin, SPEECH GENRES AND OTHER LATE ESSAYS (1986), pp. 103-131.