4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid Lterary Biography, November 25, 2000
This review is from: Mikhail Bakhtin (Paperback)
This is the only Biography of Mikhail Bakhtin available in English. Published in 1984, it is now outdated, but it is still worth reading for those interested in Bakhtin and his work. The Biography more or less follows the chronological order of his life, and therefore is helpful in placing his work in a particular time. This is important because the English Translations, especially the Essay compilations, "Dialogic Imagination" and "Speech Genres and other Late Essays", tend to mix work from diferent periods in his life. Bakhtin's thought changed and developed in his life, and this Biography helps make sense of this. Actual details and anecdotes of Bakhtin's life, that help putting a "man behind the work", are disappointingly scant. The reader will not learn much about what Bakhtin actually did outside his work in this Literary Biography. Most of all, I would have been interested in his reading likes, as well as dislikes, and his opinions of Authors and Literary Theorists. Otherwise, this Biogrpahy is well written and researched, but now out of date. For Bakhtin studies a new Biography is neded, and even more importantly a Critical Edition of his work.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Intellectually inspiring, March 13, 2005
This review is from: Mikhail Bakhtin (Paperback)
Intellectuals in societies which are quick to proclaim their own freedoms also have a tendency to support individuals in an opposing totalitarian system who have subversive attitudes and defy the structure of repressive societies. Highly modern societies have identified forms of oppression which make it easy for young people to turn against traditional values by identifying with entertainment personalities who can make opposition to mundane social norms entertaining by holding the creeps who end up on top up to ridicule. Of the fifteen chapters in MIKHAIL BAKHTIN by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist (Harvard University Press, 1984), the emphasis on comic themes increases as the book approaches Chapter 14, Rabelais and His World (pp. 295-320). Halfway there, Chapter 7, Freudianism, set in the 1920s, includes the idea that Freud could attack dominant philosophies because his science had "an ambition to locate a world beyond the social and the historical, a search for this world precisely in the depths of the organic--these are the features that pervade all systems of contemporary philosophy and constitute the symptom of the disintegration and decline of the bourgeois world." (p. 176). The revolutionary soviet society of Mikhail Bakhtin's lifetime (1895-1975) included perverse efforts to direct intellectuals to exalt the lowest of the people, on the one hand, as the secret police also tried to stifle any enemies of the ultimate power of the ruling system of ideas, on the other hand, based on building an advanced industrial society that exalted superpower values over other global values.
Reading Freud as an ideology that didn't seem like any scientific description of nature, Bakhtin was smart enough to think that balance was not revealed by "mutual hostility and incomprehension and the endeavor to deceive one another." (p. 178). Bakhtin assumes the doctor who tries to treat anyone must stand in for a society that can't allow idiosyncratic individual views. The language of Freud can be seen politically because "This opposition between official and unofficial politicizes categories that less global thinkers would have felt were far from politics of any kind." (p. 181). Bakhtin's science of ideologies tried to apply different idea systems to each other, joining a clash of ideas that is likely to last, for, "As Bakhtin never tired of saying, the last word is never said." (p. 196).
Chapter 10, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, makes the messiness of history a large part of the meaning of any utterance. Concern about understanding the past has been the basis of the sciences of language.
`Linguistics was the child of philology, and as such, it had always taken "as its point of departure an utterance that was finished, monologic: the ancient written monument, considering it the ultimate realism . . . Despite the vast difference in cultural and historical characteristics, from the ancient Hindu priests to the modern European scholar of language, the philologist has always and everywhere been a decipherer of alien, `secret' scripts and words . . . The first philologists and the first linguists were always and everywhere priests. History knows no nations whose sacred writings were not to some degree in a language foreign and incomprehensible to the profane. To decipher the mystery of sacred words was the task meant to be carried out by the priest-philologists." ' (pp. 222-223).
The modern emphasis on entertainment values is in line with the amount of attention devoted to novels, an individual author's attempt to provide pleasure to individual readers. Chapter 11, Dostoevsky's Poetics, brings up melodramatic similarities. "Even at the level of personal experience there were affinities between them. Both were arrested for political crimes, and just as Bakhtin's sentence to certain death in Solovki was changed to exile in Kazakhstan, so was Dostoevsky's death by firing squad on Semyenovsky Square commuted to exile in Siberia." (p. 239). Bakhtin enjoyed finding characters in Dostoevsky's novels who were "capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him." (p. 240). "Characters in a novel are not like flies, immobilized in the objectlike amber that surrounds them." (p. 243). "Extralocality describes a position which can be known only through the most complex triangulation of interpersonal relations." (p. 246). This is great for big themes. "For instance, death is more often than not forced on characters in Tolstoy." (p. 247). Christ is discussed as a "theological trope." (p. 248). Similar work in "the most radical overturning of authority" (p. 250) is leading to comparison with carnival activities. "This juxtaposition of the Gospels and menippean tradition was also made by another philologist, Erich Auerbach, who, like Bakhtin, did some of his finest work in exile." (p. 250).
Chapter 13, The Theory of the Novel, includes some discussion of the chronotope, a concept derived from Kant on space and time "in the sense of the total integration of neurological and psychological forces into a characteristic pattern that shapes our perception of the world." (p. 279). Anthropologists have pointed out `the importance of the middle or betwixt-and-between stage called "liminality" which in a rite of passage separates the initial state of identity from the identity achieved at the conclusion of the rite. This cultic aspect of the chronotope is present in Christian hagiography as well, where metamorphosis is encountered as conversion experience.' (p. 283).
Rabelais is appreciated for "carnival, which is a social institution, and grotesque realism, which is a literary mode." (p. 299). "Carnival and the grotesque both have the effect of plunging certainty into ambivalence and uncertainty, as a result of their emphasis on contradictions and the relativity of all classificatory systems." (p. 304). The Stalinism which celebrated workers as superheroes runs into the same contradictions, or their opposites, which might be even more absurd. Their "Folk bards were set to writing epic songs and ditties glorifying the new age, . . ." (p. 310). Lacking "the culture of laughter and the marketplace with all its subversiveness, . . ." (p. 310), it was not funny, but we in a free society understand what is truly great.
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