Bakhtin and his Others

Liisa Steinby And Tintti Klapuri

Description

‘Bakhtin and his Others’ offers fresh theoretical insights, modern research and various case studies on Bakhtin’s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality.

‘Bakhtin and his Others’ aims to develop an understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas through a contextual approach, particularly with a focus on Bakhtin studies from the 1990s onward. The volume offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin’s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality – including his concepts of chronotope and literary polyphony – by reconsidering his ideas in relation to the sources he employs, and taking into account later research on similar topics. The case studies show how Bakhtin's ideas, when seen in light of this approach, can be constructively employed in contemporary literary research.

Acknowledgements; Translation and Transliteration; Introduction: The Acting Subject of Bakhtin – Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri; Chapter 1: Bakhtin and Lukács: Subjectivity, Signifying Form and Temporality in the Novel – Liisa Steinby; Chapter 2: Bakhtin, Watt and the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel – Aino Mäkikalli; Chapter 3: Concepts of Novelistic Polyphony: Person-Related and Compositional-Thematic – Liisa Steinby; Chapter 4: Familiar Otherness: Peculiarities of Dialogue in Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Inclusion – Mikhail Oshukov; Chapter 5: Author and Other in Dialogue: Bakhtinian Polyphony in the Poetry of Peter Reading – Christian Pauls; Chapter 6: Tradition and Genre: Thomas Kyd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ – Edward Gieskes; Chapter 7: Bakhtin’s Concept of the Chronotope: The Viewpoint of an Acting Subject – Liisa Steinby; Chapter 8: The Provincial Chronotope and Modernity in Chekhov’s Short Fiction –Tintti Klapuri; List of Contributors 

Sujets

• PHILOSOPHY
• Literary theory
• Language
• Langage

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780857283108
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Bakhtin and his OthersBakhtin and his Others
(Inter)subjectivity, Chronotope, Dialogism
Edited by
Liisa Steinby and Tintti KlapuriAnthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2013
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
© 2013 Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri editorial matter
and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bakhtin and his Others : (inter)subjectivity, chronotope, dialogism /
edited by Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-85728-308-5 (hardback : alkaline paper)
1. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895–1975–Criticism and interpretation.
2. Literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc. 3. Literature–Aesthetics.
4. Subject (Philosophy) in literature. 5. Intersubjectivity in literature.
6. Dialogism (Literary analysis) I. Steinby, Liisa, editor. II. Klapuri, Tintti, editor.
PG2947.B3B325 2013
801'.95092–dc23
2012049649
ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 308 5 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 0 85728 308 1 (Hbk)
Cover image © 2013 Tintti Klapuri
This title is also available as an eBook.CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Translation and Transliteration ix
Introduction The Acting Subject of Bakhtin xi
Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri
Chapter 1 Bakhtin and Lukács: Subjectivity, Signifying
Form and Temporality in the Novel 1
Liisa Steinby
Chapter 2 Bakhtin, Watt and the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel 19
Aino Mäkikalli
Chapter 3 Concepts of Novelistic Polyphony: Person-Related
and Compositional-Thematic 37
Liisa Steinby
Chapter 4 Familiar Otherness: Peculiarities of Dialogue
in Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Inclusion 55
Mikhail Oshukov
Chapter 5 Author and Other in Dialogue: Bakhtinian
Polyphony in the Poetry of Peter Reading 73
Christian Pauls
Chapter 6 Tradition and Genre: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy 87
Edward Gieskes
Chapter 7 Bakhtin’s Concept of the Chronotope:
The Viewpoint of an Acting Subject 105
Liisa Steinby
Chapter 8 The Provincial Chronotope and Modernity
in Chekhov’s Short Fiction 127
Tintti Klapuri
List of Contributors 147ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea of this book originated in the research project ‘Literature and Time:
Time, Modernity and Human Agency in Literature’ at the Department of
Comparative Literature of the University of Turku, funded by the Academy of
Finland (Grant # 2600066111); of the authors, Tintti Klapuri, Aino Mäkikalli
and Liisa Steinby are members of the project, while Mikhail Oshukov is closely
associated with it. The chapters by Edward Gieskes and Christian Pauls are
based on papers given in two Bakhtin workshops organized by the editors
of this volume at the conference ‘Genre and Interpretation’, held as part of
the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies at the University of
Helsinki in June 2009.
The research carried out at the Bakhtin Centre, University of Sheffield, has
been a source of great inspiration for our work. We want to thank Prof. Craig
Brandist, director of the Bakhtin Centre, for his involvement in our research
project and for his continuous interest in our work. In addition, we are grateful
to Dr Ellen Valle for language revision and to the two anonymous reviewers of
the manuscript for their insightful reading and helpful suggestions.TRANSLATION AND
TRANSLITERATION
Unless otherwise stated, translations are by the authors.
With the exception of some commonly occurring names, Russian words are
transliterated in a simplified version of Library of Congress system (without
diacritics). The soft sign is not used and ц is transliterated as c.Introduction
THE ACTING SUBJECT OF BAKHTIN
Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri
The international study of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin has recently witnessed
a significant reorientation. Bakhtin was originally introduced in the West,
from the 1960s to the 1980s, by two important structuralist theoreticians,
Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov, who represented him as a forerunner
of structuralist thinking. In Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ and ‘polyphony’ they saw
forms of intertextuality (Kristeva 1980; Todorov 1984), defined by Kristeva
as follows: ‘Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the
absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality comes
to take the place of the notion of intersubjectivity’ (Kristeva 1980, 66). In this
interpretation, Bakhtin is placed within a framework of thinking in which the
constitutive meaning of the interpretative subject is erased and the subject of
narration is ‘reduced to a code, to a nonperson, to an anonymity’ (Kristeva
1980, 74). As an extension of this, it is in the framework of late structuralist
discourse pluralism that Bakhtin’s concept of ‘dialogism’ has since the 1980s
flourished especially in the United States (Holquist 2002). This interpretation
of Bakhtin as a textualist is now recognized as an undue ‘familiarization’,
occurring in an intellectual atmosphere in which structuralism was dominant
(cf. Zbinden 2006).
The recent reassessment of Bakhtin’s thinking has resulted from the
contextualization of his work in its original intellectual background: on the
one hand in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German thought in
the areas of philosophy, aesthetics and the theory of the novel, on the other
in a Russian and early Soviet context, which itself was in general deeply
influenced by German thinking. This work of reassessment, due largely to
British scholars – among them David Shepherd (e.g. Shepherd 1998), Ken
Hirschkop (1999), Galin Tihanov (2000) and Craig Brandist (2002; see
also Brandist and Lähteenmäki 2010) – has contributed to our present new
understanding of Bakhtin’s thought. The most important German sources xii Bakhtin and his Others
of Bakhtin’s work are identified in this new scholarship as being k ant and
hegel; the neo-k antians; the ‘philosophers of life’; Georg Lukács, in both
his early, neo-k antian–hegelian and his later Marxist phases (cf. tihanov
2000); the phenomenologists edmund husserl and Max scheler (cf. Poole
2001; Brandist 2002); and thinkers who, while proceeding from philosophy,
figure among the founders of sociology, including Georg simmel. among
the neo-k antians, those most important for Bakhtin are considered to be
hermann Cohen and ernst Cassirer (cf. steinby 2011; Poole 1998), while the
relevant ‘philosophers of life’ include such diverse thinkers as Wilhelm dilthey
1and henri Bergson. an essential cause of the earlier misunderstanding was
that Bakhtin notoriously tended to leave his sources unmentioned, especially
philosophical ones – perhaps primarily because in the stalinist era it might
have been dangerous to quote a ‘bourgeois’ thinker. t he writers he drew upon
were in any case most probably familiar to his r ussian fellow-intellectuals;
when his writings were introduced in the West in the 1960s, however, this
background was not recognized by his new audience. he was therefore read
as more original than he actually was, even as an entirely unique thinker,
without precedent, whose main theoretical concepts – the polyphonic novel,
the chronotope, and carnivalism – were entirely his own creation. in addition
to the work of British scholars, the studies of Caryl emerson and Gary saul
Morson (Morson and emerson 1990; emerson 1997), working in the United
states, and r enate Lachmann (1982) and Matthias Freise (1993) in Germany,
have helped to contextualize Bakhtin’s thought and have hence contributed to
the ways in which Bakhtin’s ideas now appear in a new, less unique light.
a fact which comes into sight when Bakhtin is contextualized in German
idealist thinking is that he formulates problems and resolves them within
the framework of the philosophy of subjectivity, with a strong emphasis on
intersubjectivity (cf. hirschkop 1999, 5, 52, 58, 86, 153, 240; Brandist 2002,
40, 44, 81). Questions of subject and intersubjectivity have been given different
interpretations and different weights in understanding Bakhtin.
The Question of Subject(ivity)
since we are used to reading Bakhtin together with P. n . Medvedev’s Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship (1978 [1928]) and V. n . Voloshinov’s Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language (1986 [1929]) – works that for a long time were attributed
to Bakhtin (cf. Brandist 2002, 8–9) – we tend to think about his idea(s) of
intersubjectivity in terms o