Full name: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

Author: Mikhail Bakhtin Year: 1975 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Philosophy, Non Fiction, Essays Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780292715349 029271534X

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. Similar books: S/Z by Roland Barthes Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes The Space of Literature by Maurice Blanchot After Theory by Terry Eagleton The World, the Text, and the Critic by Edward W. Said Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes Literature and Evil by Georges Bataille Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin Blindness and Insight by Paul de Man Theory of literature by Rene Wellek Mimesis by Erich Auerbach The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth A Rhetoric of Irony by Wayne C. Booth Mythologies by Roland Barthes The Wave in the Mind by Ursula K. Le Guin Minima Moralia by Theodor W. Adorno The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry Every Force Evolves a Form by Guy Davenport