Talk:Mikhail Bakhtin

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I was slightly surprised to find 'Marxism and the Philosophy of Language' on this list, as it lol was actually written by Voloshinov. Obviously there are rumours that persist over the authorship of the book, but i think it details a very different approach to the one discussed elsewhere in Bakhtin's work. And therefore we should credit Voloshinov as the rightful author of the book.--CJ 18:55, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

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Let's fill up some concepts folks. I only know Bakhtin's Toward a Philosophy of the Act and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Just filled in the part on Dostoevsky's Poetics. Please fill in the Third Period stuff.. --oldseed 7am 27 November 2005

Contents 1 Formalism 2 dialogic imagination 3 Bakhtin's Influence 4 Ethics 5 Rabelais and His World 6 Plagiarism 7 English editions

[edit] Formalism

Who is responsible for listing Bakhtin as a formalist or Russian formalist, and what is your justification? As far as my understanding from reading his own works (pretty much everything he wrote) as well as 2 works by Morson (Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics and Narrative & History) I would call Bakhtin an anti-formalist; he was perhaps the strongest critic of formalism in all of the USSR. This is made crystal-clear in Moron's "Creation of a Prosaics", or by any understanding of Bakhtin's general concepts. Unless somebody provides some strong justification for labeling him as a Russian Formalist I will change the article. I can provide citations from Morson's book to support this change. —Preceding unsigned comment added by V krishna (talk • contribs) 01:12, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] dialogic imagination

one should note that this collection was compiled after his death and published in english under that name; he never title any of his works so. Dsol 17:02, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bakhtin's Influence

Hi Am2pearc, thanks for your recent contributions. Just one question, I don't suppose you'd like to elaborate on the 'Influence' section? The following troubles me:

• "As a result of the breadth of topics with which Bakhtin dealt, he was able to influence groups of theorists in the West including Neo-Marxists, Structuralists, and semioticians. However, his influence on such groups has, somewhat paradoxically, resulted in narrowing the scope of Bakhtin’s work. Rarely do those who incorporate Bakhtin’s ideas into theories of their own appreciate his work in its entirety (Clark and Holquist 3)".

Who is being criticised here and on what grounds? Could the same not be said of Clark & Holquist's interpretation? --Nicholas 15:17, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ethics

Please do not delete the entire Bakhtin article leaving only the biography. It is unethical as Wikipedia is a collaborative effort. Please feel free to work with me so we can have the best of both of our posts working together for a clear and effective article. The goal is to have a successful, comprehensive article on Bakhtin. Please, lets continue to work together to maintain and improve the Bakhtin article, to make sure all users and researchers have an abundance of information on Bakhtin.

[edit] Rabelais and His World

The section says "According to Bakhtin, the body is in need of a type of clock if it to be aware of its timelessness," but there's no citation. The grotesque body persists through the ancestral body (Bakhtin 322) but I wouldn't call it timelessness or say that this persistence is the most important part of the grotesque. The section lays too much emphasis on Holquist's interpretation and not enough on the text itself. What really needs to be included is reference to the grotesque's incompleteness: "[Grotesque] forms seem to be interwoven as if giving birth to each other. The borderlines that divided the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldly infringed. Neither was there the usual static presentation of reality. There was no longer the movement of finished forms, vegetable or animal, in a finished and stable world; instead the inner movement of being itself was expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incompleted character of being" (Bakhtin 32). And the importance of eating, drinking, and sex in Bakhtin isn't just that they measure the persistence of the body but also that the demonstrate its incompleteness (Bakhtin 317-18). I would change the article instead of posting here, but I'm not sure how to make Bakhtin's emphasis on incompleteness jive with this bit about timelessness, partly because I haven't read Holquist, et al. Any ideas?

The other thing that's missing is reference to "the material bodily lower stratum," which is pretty important to both popular festive forms and the grotesque in Rabelais and His World (370-1). The carnival and grotesque realism debase the individual to the level of the material bodily lower stratum through praise-abuse, merry violence, scatological humor, turning the world topsy turvy, the underworld, and, as the article says, "a heightened awareness of sensual, material, bodily unity". The reason being is that death and birth form a dual body; the body must be thrown down, debased, and die to rise up, laugh, and be resurrected (435). Jordansc 21:32, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Plagiarism

Bakhtin is supposed to have plagiarized some of Cassirer's work. I don't really care, but I'm guessing some readers will want to know something about the controversy. Does anybody here know enough to write on it?--WadeMcR 09:03, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] English editions

I hope somebody can answer this 2 questions:

• The only English translator of Rabelais and His World [original Russian 1941] seems to be Hélène Iswolsky. Which year did she published it? In the article it says 1993, but it seems too late.
• At page 6 of the book there is a note on a work by Eleazar M. Meletinskii. It says it has been published in 1963. But in English or Russian? Does any English translation exist for it?

--BMF81 10:14, 2 June 2007 (UTC)