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. |
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... motifs are chronotopic ( although it is true the chronotope is de- veloped in different ways in the various genres ) . We shall discuss here only one motif , but the one that is probably the most impor- tant - the motif of meeting . As ...
... motif , and many words are directly constructed on the road chronotope , and on road meetings and adventures . " The motif of meeting is also closely related to other impor- tant motifs , especially the motif of recognition ...
... motifs of transformation and identity ( no matter how varied in its turn the concrete ex- pression of these motifs might be ) . The motifs of transformation and identity , which began as matters of concern for the individ- ual , are ...