Mikhail Bakhtin

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays presents six short works from Bakhtin' Esthetics of Creative Discourse, published in Moscow in 1979. This is the last of Bakhtin' extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman ) were written in Bakhtin' later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.

Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Fiction presents an advanced introduction to the work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, focusing on the concepts of carnival, dialogism, and historicism. The discussion of Bakhtin pays particular attention to the impact of his historical context in the Soviet Union and to the importance of his own dialogic mode of discourse. Bakhtin's ideas are then placed in dialogic relation to the works of several important writers of modern Russian fiction, including Vassily Aksyonov, Ilf and Petrov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Andrei Bitov, and Sasha Sokolov.

In a book that itself exemplifies the dialogic scholarship it proposes, Kay Halasek reconceives composition studies from a Bakhtinian perspective, focusing on both the discipline's theoretical assumptions and its pedagogies.

Framing her discussions at every level of the discipline -- theoretical, historical, pedagogical -- Halasek provides an overview of portions of the Bakhtinian canon relevant to composition studies, explores the implications of Mikhail Bakhtin's work in the teaching of writing and for current debates about the role of theory in composition studies, and provides a model of scholarship that strives to maintain dialogic balance between practice and theory, between composition studies and Bakhtinian thought.

Halasek's study ranges broadly across the field of composition, painting in wide strokes a new picture of the discipline, focusing on the finer details of the rhetorical situation, and teasing out the implications of Bakhtinian thought for classroom practice by examining the nature of critical reading and writing, the efficacy and ethics of academic discourse, student resistance, and critical and conflict pedagogy. The book ends by setting out a pedagogy of possibility, what Halasek terms elsewhere a "post-critical pedagogy" that redefines and redirects current discussions of home versus academic literacies and discourses.

"No one working in this line of inquiry has yet come close to [Halasek] in articulating Bakhtin's views with those of the authoritative voices in composition studies; no one has recognized and developed the implications of his work across the key topics of the field from disciplinarity to history to theory to pedagogy; no one has managed, asshe has, to shift the ground of conversation in the field into Bakhtinian terrain, forcefully modifying the questions we need to ask and at the same time leaving open spaces for our investigating and debating them. This is o

This book makes a radical break with earlier interpretations of Bakhtin's work. Using recent Russian scholarship, Ken Hirschkop explodes many of the myths which have surrounded Bakhtin and his work and lays the ground for a new, more historically acute sense of his achievement. Through a comprehensive reading of Bakhtin's work, Hirschkop demonstrates that his discussion of the philosophy of language, literary history, popular festive culture, and the phenomenology of everyday life revolved around a lifelong search for a new kind of modern ethical culture. A detailed examination of the major works reveals the careful interweaving of philosophical and historical argument which makes Bakhtin at once so compelling and so frustrating a writer. Hirschkop treats Bakhtin not as a metaphysician or a philosopher for the ages, but as a writer inevitably drawn into the historical conflicts produced by a modernizing and democratizing Europe. As a consequence, Bakhtin becomes a more sober but also more original writer, with a striking contribution to make to the definition of the democratic project.

'The interpretations offered here are among the most sensitive and enlightening that I have seen. . .Kershner has produced an analysis with profound and diverse implications for further studies of Joyce and his culture.' -James Joyce Quarterly

Holquist's masterly study draws on all of Bakhtin's known writings providing a comprehensive account of his achievement. Widely acknowledged as an exceptional guide to Bakhtin and dialogics, this book now includes a new introduction, concluding chapter and a fully updated bibliography. He argues that Bakhtin's work gains coherence through his commitment to the concept of dialogue, examining Bakhtin's dialogues with theorists such as Saussure, Freud, Marx and Lukacs, as well as other thinkers whose connection with Bakhtin has previously been ignored. Dialogism also includes dialogic readings of major literary texts, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , Gogol's The Notes of a Madman and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , which provide another dimension of dialogue with dialogue.

This book examines the influence of Christianity on the thought and work of the great Russian theorist Mikhael Bakhtin, paying particular attention to the motifs of God the Creator, the Fall, the Incarnation and Christian love. This is the first full-length work to approach Bakhtin from a religious perspective, and introduces the reader to a vitally important but hitherto ignored aspect of his work. In this context Ruth Coates presents readings of Bakhtin very different from those of Marxist and Structuralist critics.