Materializing Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory (St. Antony's)

216 Pages·2000·0.72 MB·English

by  Craig Brandist

Materializing Bakhtin
The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory
Edited by
Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov
brandist/90015/crc (sam) 25/11/99 4:24 pm Page 1
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MATERIALIZING BAKHTIN
The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory
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Materializing Bakhtin
The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory
Edited by
Craig Brandist
AHRB Research Fellow
University of Sheffield
and
Galin Tihanov
Merton College
University of Oxford
in association with
ST ANTONY’S COLLEGE, OXFORD
brandist/90015/crc (sam) 25/11/99 4:24 pm Page 4
First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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Companies and representatives throughout the world
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ISBN 0–333–74664–3
First published in the United States of America 2000 by
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0–312–22860–0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Materializing Bakhtin : the Bakhtin circle and social theory / edited
by Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–312–22860–0 (cloth)
^
1. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895–1975—Influence.
^
2. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895–1975—Philosophy.
^
3. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895–1975—Political and
social views. 4. Social sciences—Philosophy. I. Brandist, Craig,
1963– . II. Tihanov, Galin.
PG2947.B3M38 1999
801'.95'092—dc21 99–40986
CIP
Selection and editorial matter ©Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov 2000
Chapter 3 ©Galin Tihanov 2000
Chapter 4 ©Craig Brandist 2000
Chapters 1, 2, 5–9 ©Macmillan Press Ltd 2000
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02PR1869 v-viii 29/9/99 10:37 Page v
Contents
Cited Works of Bakhtin, Voloshinov and Medvedev vi
Notes on the Contributors vii
Introduction: Appropriation in History 1
1 The World According to Globalization and Bakhtin
Peter Hitchcock 3
2 Bakhtin’s Dialogism Reconsidered through Hegel’s
‘Monologism’: the Dialectical Foundation of Aesthetics
and Ideology in Contemporary Human Sciences
Jean-François Côté 20
3 Culture, Form, Life: the Early Lukács and the Early Bakhtin
Galin Tihanov 43
4 Bakhtin, Marxism and Russian Populism
Craig Brandist 70
5 Memories of Nature in Bakhtin and Benjamin
Barry Sandywell 94
6 ‘A Very Understandable Horror of Dialectics’: Bakhtin
and Marxist Phenomenology
Michael Gardiner 119
7 Looking Back on the Subject: Mead and Bakhtin on
Reflexivity and the Political
Greg Nielsen 142
8 Bakhtin and the Study of Popular Culture: Re-thinking
Carnival as a Historical and Analytical Concept
Chris Humphrey 164
9 What is Marxism in Linguistics?
Vladimir M. Alpatov 173
Bibliography 194
Index 205
v
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Cited Works of Bakhtin,
Voloshinov and Medvedev
RWR Bakhtin, M.M. (1965) Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia
kul’tura srednevekov’ia i renessansa, Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura.
VLE Bakhtin, M.M. (1975) Voprosy literatury i estetiki, Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura.
DI Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist,
Austin: University of Texas Press.
PDP Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics,
trans. C. Emerson, Minneapolis: Minnesota University
Press.
RW Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. H.
Iswolsky, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
SG Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays,
trans. V.W. McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press.
AA Bakhtin, M.M. (1990) Art and Answerability, trans. V.
Liapunov, ed. M. Holquist and V. Liapunov, Austin:
University of Texas Press.
FM Bakhtin, M.M. and P.N. Medvedev (1991) The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to
Sociological Poetics, trans. A.J. Wehrle, Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
TPA Bakhtin, M.M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans.
V. Liapunov, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Raboty Bakhtin, M.M. (1994) Raboty 1920-x godov,Kiev: Next.
PDAP Bakhtin, M.M. (1994) Problemy tvorchestva/poetiki
Dostoevskogo,Kiev: Next.
SS Bakhtin, M.M. (1996) Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 5, Moscow:
Russkie slovari.
F Voloshinov, V. (1976) Freudiansm: A Marxist Critique,
trans. I.R. Titunik, New York: Academic Press.
MPL Voloshinov, V. (1986) Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language, trans. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
MFL Voloshinov, V. (1993) Marksism i filosofiia iazyka, Moscow:
Labirint.
vi
02PR1869 v-viii 29/9/99 10:37 Page vii
Notes on the Contributors
Vladimir M. Alpatov is deputy Director of the Institute of Oriental
Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He is the
author of many works on general linguistics, Japanese language, socio-
linguistics and the history of science in addition to his works on the
Bakhtin Circle. His recent books include Istoriia odnogo mifa: Marr i
marrizm (Moscow, 1991) and Istoriia lingvisticheskikh uchenii (Moscow,
1998).
Craig Brandist is an HRB Research Fellow at the Bakhtin Centre and
Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at Sheffield University. He
is the author of Carnival Culture and the Soviet Modernist Novel
(Macmillan, 1996) and of numerous articles on the Bakhtin Circle,
Russian literature and culture and intellectual history. He is currently
working on a translation and critical electronic edition of the works of
the Bakhtin Circle and a new critical introduction to their work.
Jean-François Côté teaches sociology at the University of Quebec at
Montreal. He is the author of several articles about Bakhtin and theor-
etical sociology in such journals as Sociologie et sociétés and Sociéte. He
is currently writing about aesthetic modernity in the USA.
Michael Gardiner teaches sociology at the University of Western
Ontario. He is the author of The Dialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and
the Theory of Ideology (Routledge, 1992), co-editor (with Michael
Mayerfeld Bell) of Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words(Sage,
1998) and author of many articles on Bakhtin, social theory and
utopianism. He is currently working on a book to be entitled Critiques
of Everyday Life(Routledge, forthcoming).
Peter Hitchcock teaches literary and cultural studies at the City
University of New York. He is the author of Dialogics of the Oppressed
(Minnesota, 1993), Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body and Spirit of Millenial
Materialism (forthcoming), the editor of Bakhtin/‘Bakhtin’: Studies from
The Archive and Beyond (SAQ 97: 3, 1998) and numerous articles on
Bakhtin.
vii
02PR1869 v-viii 29/9/99 10:37 Page viii
viii Notes on the Contributors
Chris Humphrey is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Medieval
Studies at the University of York. He has published several articles on
medieval festal culture. His book The Politics of Carnival: Culture and
Social Change in Medieval England is forthcoming with Manchester
University Press. He is currently working on an interdisciplinary study
of time and temporal change in late medieval England.
Greg Nielsenteaches sociology at Concordia University in Canada. He
is the author of a Bakhtinian study of Canadian political culture and
comedy called Le Canada de Radio-Canada: Sociologie critique et dia-
logisme culturel (Toronto, 1994) and numerous other articles on
Bakhtinian themes. He is currently working on a book that brings
Bakhtin into a dialogue with classical and contemporary sociological
theory.
Barry Sandywellis Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at
the University of York. He is the author of the still incomplete multi-
volumeLogological Investigations (Routledge 1996–), a work tracing the
history of alterity, reflexivity and ethics in philosophy and the human
sciences. He is also co-editor of Interpreting Visual Culture: Studies in the
Hermeneutics of Vision (Routledge 1999) and several essays on Bakhtin
in various journals and collections.
Galin Tihanov is Junior Research Fellow in Russian and German
Intellectual History at Merton College, Oxford. He holds doctorates
from Sofia University and the University of Oxford and is the author
of two books on Bulgarian literature, articles on comparative literature
and the history of ideas, and a forthcoming book on Bakhtin and
Lukács to be published by Oxford University Press.
03CH1869 1-2 16/9/99 10:30 am Page 1
Introduction:
Appropriation in History
For a very long time, Bakhtin Studies have been informed by a holistic
approach, which in the nearly 20 years since its inauguration by
Tzvetan Todorov’s Mikhaïl Bakhtine: le principe dialogique(1981) yielded
a number of biographies, expositions and anthologies of, as well as
introductions into, Bakhtin’s writings. Simultaneously, there has been
a strong trend of interpreting Bakhtin from the agenda of group rights,
gender studies and post-colonial theory. A third persistent line has
been the use of the Circle’s writings for the purposes of analysing liter-
ary texts; this is the principal way in which Bakhtin has been turned
into a constant presence in the seminar and classrooms of European
and American universities.
At present, Bakhtin Studies are undergoing a noticeable shift of
attention away from the application of the Circles’s work towards the
exploration of its historical foundations and contexts. Recent exam-
ples of this new trend have been Caryl Emerson’s The First Hundred
Years of Mikhail Bakhtin(1997), the first book investigating the history
of the responses to Bakhtin’s work in Russia, The Contexts of Bakhtin
(1998), a volume edited by David Shepherd and containing essays
written in the early 1990s, and the articles of Brian Poole, Nina Perlina
and Nikolai Nikolaev, among others.
More often than not, scholars of a more historical persuasion have
been arguing that their perspective should be deemed incompatible
with the desire to harness Bakhtin’s work for interpreting modern
cultural and social occurrences. This volume attempts to bring
together the strong sides of the two latter perspectives to demonstrate
that by exploring the historical backgrounds and contexts of Bakhtin’s
work we could attain a better grasp of its significance. Hence the title
of this volume: it conveys our belief that, as Valentin Voloshinov
1