The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin [Paperback]

Among Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ideological spectrum, from old-fashioned humanist to structuralist to postmodernist. In this candid assessment of his place in Russian and Western thought, Caryl Emerson brings to light what might be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader: Bakhtin's foundational ideas, forged in the early revolutionary years, yet hardly altered in his lifetime. With the collapse of the Soviet system, a truer sense of Bakhtin's contribution may now be judged in the context of its origins and its contemporary Russian reclamation.

A foremost Bakhtin authority, Caryl Emerson mines extensive Russian sources to explore Bakhtin's reception in Russia, from his earliest publication in 1929 until his death, and his posthumous rediscovery. After a reception-history of Bakhtin's published work, she examines the role of his ideas in the post-Stalinist revival of the Russian literary profession, concentrating on the most provocative rethinkings of three major concepts in his world: dialogue and polyphony; carnival; and outsideness, a position Bakhtin considered essential to both ethics and aesthetics. Finally, she speculates on the future of Bakhtin's method, which was much more than a tool of criticism: it will tell you how to teach, write, live, talk, think.

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1998"Caryl Emersonis A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is the author, with Gary Saul Morson, ofMikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, and is a primary translator of Bakhtin into English. She has also written on Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, the Russian critical tradition, and Russian music. Caryl Emerson is arguably the most knowledgeable and gifted Bakhtin Scholar in the United States....The First Hundred Years of Mikhal#·