The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.

BAKHTIN, M. M.

ISBN 10: 029271534X / ISBN 13: 9780292715349

Published by Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987

About this Item

Publisher's card stock purple wrappers, octavo, pp. xxxiv, 444. Previous owner name inside front cover. Some pages with underlining, highlighting, and marginal notes, but most pages are unmarked. Shelf and handling wear.

Seller Inventory # 21084

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
• Publisher: Austin, TX: University of Texas Press
• Publication Date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 029271534X
• ISBN 13: 9780292715349
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

These 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.

About the Author

M. M. Bakhtin (1895-1975) is one of the preeminent figures in twentieth-century philosophical thought.