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[edit] Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art: polyphony and unfinalizability

During his time in Leningrad, Bakhtin shifted his focus away from the philosophy characteristic of his early works and towards the notion of dialogue. It is at this time that he began his engagement with the work of Dostoevsky. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art is considered to be Bakhtin’s seminal work, and

it is here that Bakhtin introduces three important concepts.

First, is the concept of the unfinalizable self: individual people cannot be finalized, completely understood, known, or labeled. Though it is possible to understand people and to treat them as if they are completely known, Bakhtin’s conception of unfinalizability respects the possibility that a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. Readers may find that this conception reflects the idea of the soul; Bakhtin had strong roots in Christianity and in the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann Cohen, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual's potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul.

Second, is the idea of the relationship between the self and others, or other groups. According to Bakhtin, every person is influenced by others in an

inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. In an interview, Bakhtin once explained that,

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative

understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. ~New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993.

As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on the self, not merely in terms of how a person comes to be, but also in how a person thinks and how a person sees him- or herself truthfully.

Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky's work a true representation of polyphony, that is, many voices. Each character in Dostoevsky's work represents a voice that speaks for an individual self, distinct from others. This idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unfinalizability and self-and-others, since it is the unfinalizability of individuals that creates true polyphony.

Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic concept of truth. He criticized the assumption that, if two people disagree, at least one of them must be in error. He challenged philosophers for whom plurality of minds is accidental and superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a sentence or a phrase. Instead, truth is a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically inconsistent, statements. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a single mind, it also cannot be expressed by \"a single mouth.\" The polyphonic truth requires many simultaneous voices. Bakhtin does not mean to say that many voices carry partial truths that complement each other. A number of different

voices do not make the truth if simply \"averaged\" or \"synthesized.\" It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from untruth.

When, in subsequent years, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art was translated into English and published in the West, Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept of carnival and the book was published with the slightly different title, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. According to Bakhtin, carnival is the context in which

distinct individual voices are heard, flourish and interact together. The carnival creates the \"threshold\" situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed and genuine dialogue becomes possible. The notion of a carnival was Bakhtin's way of describing Dostoevsky's polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is to say, the voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.

[edit] Rabelais and His World: carnival and grotesque

Main article: Rabelais and His World

During World War II Bakhtin submitted a dissertation on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais which was not defended until some years later. The controversial ideas discussed within the work caused much disagreement, and it was consequently decided that Bakhtin be denied his doctorate. Thus, due to its content, Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages

and Renaissance was not published until 1965, at which time it was given the title, Rabelais and His World.[14]

A classic of Renaissance studies, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin explores Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel.[15] Bakhtin declares that, for centuries, Rabelais’s book had been misunderstood, and claimed that Rabelais and His World clarified Rabelais’s intentions. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin concerns

himself with the openness of Gargantua and Pantagruel; however, the book itself also serves as an example of such openness. Throughout the text, Bakhtin attempts two things: he seeks to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that, in the past, were either ignored or suppressed, and conducts an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language that was not. It is by means of this analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is carnival (carnivalesque) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body.[16] [edit] The Dialogic Imagination: Chronotope, Heteroglossia

The Dialogic Imagination (first published as a whole in 1975) is a compilation

of four essays concerning language and the novel: \"Epic and Novel\" (1941), \"From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,\" \"Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,\" and \"Discourse in the Novel.\" It is through the essays contained within

The Dialogic Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope, making a significant contribution to the realm of

literary scholarship.[17] Bakhtin explains the generation of meaning through the \"primacy of context over text\" (heteroglossia), the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia) and the relation between utterances (intertextuality).[18][19]

Heteroglossia is \"the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance.\"[19][20] To make an utterance means to \"appropriate the words of others and populate them with one's own intention.\"[19][21] Bakhtin's deep insights on dialogicality represent a substantive shift from views on the nature of language and knowledge by major thinkers as Ferdinand de Saussure and Kant.[22][verification needed]

In \"Epic and Novel,\" Bakhtin demonstrates the novel’s distinct nature by contrasting it with the epic. By doing so, Bakhtin shows that the novel is well suited to the post-industrial civilization in which we live because it flourishes on diversity. It is this same diversity that the epic attempts to eliminate from the world. According to Bakhtin, the novel as a genre is unique in that it is able to embrace, ingest, and devour other genres while still maintaining its status as a novel. Other genres, however, cannot emulate the novel without damaging their own distinct identity.[23] \"From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse\" is a less traditional essay in which Bakhtin reveals how various different texts from the past have ultimately come together to form the modern novel.[24]

\"Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel\" introduces Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. This essay applies the concept in order to further demonstrate the distinctive quality of the novel.[24] The word chronotope literally means \"time space\" and is defined by Bakhtin as \"the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.\"[25] For the purpose of his writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is forced to make use of the organizing categories of the real world in which he lives. For this reason chronotope is a concept that engages reality.[26] The final essay, \"Discourse in the Novel,\" is one of Bakhtin’s most complete statements concerning his philosophy of language. It is here that Bakhtin provides a model for a history of discourse and introduces the concept of heteroglossia.[24] The term heteroglossia refers to the qualities of a language that are extralinguistic, but common to all languages. These include qualities such as perspective, evaluation, and ideological positioning. In this way most languages are incapable of neutrality, for every word is inextricably bound to the context in which it exists.[27]

[edit] Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays Bakhtin moves away from the novel and concerns himself with the problems of method and the nature of culture. There are six essays that comprise this compilation: \"Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,\" \"The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism,\" \"The Problem of Speech Genres,\" \"The Problem of the Text in

Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis,\" \"From Notes Made in 1970-71,\" and \"Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences.\"

\". Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff\" is a transcript of comments made by Bakhtin to a reporter from a monthly journal called Novy Mir that was widely read by Soviet intellectuals. The transcript expresses Bakhtin’s opinion of literary scholarship whereby he highlights some of its shortcomings and makes suggestions for improvement.[28]

\"The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism\" is a fragment from one of Bakhtin’s lost books. The publishing house to which Bakhtin had submitted the full manuscript was blown up during the German invasion and Bakhtin was in possession of only the prospectus. However, due to a shortage of paper, Bakhtin began using this remaining section to roll cigarettes. So only a portion of the opening section remains. This remaining section deals primarily with Goethe.[29]

\"The Problem of Speech Genres\" deals with the difference between Saussurean linguistics and language as a living dialogue (translinguistics). In a relatively short space, this essay takes up a topic about which Bakhtin had planned to write a book, making the essay a rather dense and complex read. It is here that Bakhtin distinguishes between literary and everyday language. According to Bakhtin, genres exist not merely in language, but rather in communication. In dealing with genres, Bakhtin indicates that they have been studied only within the

realm of rhetoric and literature, but each discipline draws largely on genres that exist outside both rhetoric and literature. These extraliterary genres have remained largely unexplored. Bakhtin makes the distinction between primary genres and secondary genres, whereby primary genres legislate those words, phrases, and expressions that are acceptable in everyday life, and secondary genres are characterized by various types of text such as legal, scientific, etc.[30]

\"The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis\" is a compilation of the thoughts Bakhtin recorded in his notebooks. These notes focus mostly on the problems of the text, but various other sections of the paper discuss topics he has taken up elsewhere, such as speech genres, the status of the author, and the distinct nature of the human sciences. However, \"The Problem of the Text\" deals primarily with dialogue and the way in which a text relates to its context. Speakers, Bakhtin claims, shape an utterance according to three variables: the object of discourse, the immediate addressee, and a superaddressee. This is what Bakhtin describes as the tertiary nature of dialogue.[31] \"From Notes Made in 1970-71\" appears also as a collection of fragments extracted from notebooks Bakhtin kept during the years of 1970 and 1971. It is here that Bakhtin discusses interpretation and its endless possibilities. According to Bakhtin, humans have a habit of making narrow interpretations, but such limited interpretations only serve to weaken the richness of the pastt.[32]

The final essay, \"Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences,\" originates

from notes Bakhtin wrote during the mid-seventies and is the last piece of writing Bakhtin produced before he died. In this essay he makes a distinction between dialectic and dialogics and comments on the difference between the text and the aesthetic object. It is here also, that Bakhtin differentiates himself from the Formalists, who, he felt, underestimated the importance of content while oversimplifying change, and the Structuralists, who too rigidly adhered to the concept of \"code.\"[33]

[edit] Disputed texts

Some of the works which bear the names of Bakhtin's close friends V. N. Vološinov and P. N. Medvedev have been attributed to Bakhtin – particularly The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and Marxism and Philosophy of Language.

These claims originated in the early 1970s and received their earliest full articulation in English in Clark and Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin. In the years since then, however, most scholars have come to agree that Vološinov and Medvedev ought to be considered the true authors of these works. Although Bakhtin undoubtedly influenced these scholars and may even have had a hand in composing the works attributed to them, it now seems clear that if it was necessary to attribute authorship of these works to one person, Vološinov and Medvedev respectively should receive credit.

[edit] Influence

He is known today for his interest in a wide variety of subjects, ideas,

vocabularies, and periods, as well as his use of authorial disguises, and for his influence (alongside György Lukács) on the growth of Western scholarship on the novel as a premiere literary genre. As a result of the breadth of topics with which he dealt, Bakhtin has influenced such Western schools of theory as Neo-Marxism, Structuralism, and Semiotics. However, his influence on such groups has, somewhat paradoxically, resulted in narrowing the scope of Bakhtin’s work. According to Clark and Holquist, rarely do those who incorporate Bakhtin’s ideas into theories of their own appreciate his work in its entirety.[34] While Bakhtin is traditionally seen as a literary critic, there can be no denying his impact on the realm of rhetorical theory. Among his many theories and ideas Bakhtin indicates that style is a developmental process, occurring both within the user of language and language itself. His work instills in the reader an awareness of tone and expression that arises from the careful formation of verbal phrasing. By means of his writing, Bakhtin has enriched the experience of verbal and written expression which ultimately aids the formal teaching of writing.[35] Some even suggest that Bakhtin introduces a new meaning to rhetoric because of his tendency to reject the separation of language and ideology.[36] Bakhtin has been compared to Derrida and Michel Foucault.[37] Dialogic

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For Dialogic Corporation, see Dialogic Corporation. The English terms dialogic and dialogism often refer to the concept used by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin in his work of literary theory, The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin contrasts the dialogic and the \"monologic\" work of literature.

The dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors. It does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but informs and is continually informed by the previous work. Dialogic literature is in communication with multiple works. This is not merely a matter of influence, for the dialogue extends in both directions, and the previous work of literature is as altered by the dialogue as the present one is. In this sense, Bakhtin's \"dialogic\" is analogous to T. S. Eliot's ideas in \"Tradition and the Individual Talent,\" where he holds that \"the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.\" [1] The influence occurs at the level of the individual word or phrase as much as it does the work and even the oeuvre or collection of works. A German cannot use the word \"fatherland\" or the phrase \"blood and soil\" without (possibly unintentionally) also echoing (or, Bakhtin would say \"refracting\") the meaning that those terms took on under National Socialism. Every word has a history of usage to which it responds, and anticipates a future response.

The term 'dialogic', however, does not just apply to literature. For Bakhtin, all language - indeed, all thought - appeared dialogic. This means that everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response. We never, in other words, speak in a vacuum. As a result, all language (and the ideas which language contains and communicates) is dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world. That said, Bakhtin also emphasized certain uses of language that maximized the dialogic nature of words, and other uses that attempted to limit or restric their polyvocality. At one extreme is novelistic discourse, particularly that of a Dostoevsky (or Mark Twain) in which various registers and languages are allowed to interact and respond to each other. At the other extreme would be the military order (or 1984 newspeak) which attempts to minimize all orientations of the work toward the past or the future, and which prompts no response but obedience.

When scholars in France, the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s rediscovered Bakhtin's work, it seemed to fit with the then-nascent concepts of \"intertextuality\". European social psychologists also applied Bakhtin's work to the study of human social experience, preferring it as a more dynamic alternative to Cartesian monologicality.

Dialogical self

The dialogical self is a psychological concept which describes the mind's ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in

close connection with external dialogue. The \"dialogical self\" is the central concept in the Dialogical Self Theory (DST), as created and developed by the Dutch psychologist Hubert Hermans since the 1990s

Dialogical Self Theory (DST) weaves two concepts, self and dialogue, together in such a way that a more profound understanding of the interconnection of self and society is achieved. Usually, the concept of self refers to something

“internal,” something that takes place within the mind of the individual person, while dialogue is typically associated with something “external,” that is, processes that take place between people involved in communication.

The composite concept “dialogical self” goes beyond the self-other dichotomy by infusing the external to the internal and, in reverse, to introduce the internal into the external. As functioning as a “society of mind”[1], the self is populated by a multiplicity of “self-positions” that have the possibility to entertain dialogical relationships with each other.

In Dialogical Self Theory (DST) the self is considered as “extended,” that is, individuals and groups in the society at large are incorporated as positions in the mini-society of the self. As a result of this extension, the self does not only include internal positions (e.g., I as the son of my mother, I as a teacher, I as a lover of jazz), but also external positions (e.g., my father, my pupils, the groups to which I belong).

Given the basic assumption of the extended self, the other is not simply

outside the self but rather an intrinsic part of it. There is not only the actual other outside the self, but also the imagined other who is entrenched as the

other-in-the-self. An important theoretical implication is that basic processes, like self-conflicts, self-criticism, self-agreements, and self-consultancy, are taking place in different domains in the self: within the internal domain (e.g., “As an enjoyer of life I disagree with myself as an ambitious worker”); between the internal and external (extended) domain (e.g., “I want to do this but the voice of my mother in myself criticizes me”) and within the external domain (e.g., “The way my colleagues interact with each other has led me to decide for another job”).

As these examples show, there is not always a sharp separation between the inside of the self and the outside world, but rather a gradual transition [2]. DST assumes that the self as a society of mind is populated by internal and external self-positions. When some positions in the self silence or suppress other positions, monological relationships prevail. When, in contrast, positions are recognized and accepted in their differences and alterity (both within and between the internal and external domains of the self), dialogical relationships emerge with the possibility to further develop and renew the self and the other as central parts of the society at large.