Bakhtin Dialogics of Critique2. Through the mediation of
literary forms, both artists and readers can understand the unity
and inner logic of an entire epoch and master new aspects of
reality. This is a highly suggestive insight, but unfortunately
Medvedev does not develop it in any great detail.BAKHTIN AND
DOSTOEVSKYS POLYPHONIC UNIVERSEProblems of Dostoevskys Poetics
remains significant in that it strives to carve out a radically new
way of looking at language and intertextuality in both literature
and everyday life.The primary concepts that emerged from this text
were to remain central to Bakhtins philosophical project until his
death in 1975, despite various theoretical shifts in orientation
and emphasis. As such, they are of more than passing interest
vis--vis the understanding of the nature of ideology and the
dynamics of discursive struggle in society, and to much
contemporary writing in sociology, communications theory, literary
criticism, and linguistics which are only now catching up to the
themes and problematics sketched out by Bakhtin and his colleagues
decades earlier.23. The first examines Dostoevskys novelistic
universe using broad philosophical categories which owe much to the
tradition of German idealist philosophy (particular that of Kant as
well as the neo-Kantians Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen) and the
Romantic aesthetic in general. The second section represents
Bakhtins attempt to situate Dostoevsky in relation to a particular
literary/cultural tradition which he designated as the
carnivalesque. He felt that this particular generic tradition could
be ultimately traced to Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire
through to the popular carnivals of the Middle Ages and early
Renaissance, and he insisted that Dostoevskys (like Rabelaiss) work
could not be adequately comprehended unless this ancient
folk-carnival basis was fully acknowledged and appreciated. The
third part is concerned with detailed stylistic analyses of
selected passages from Dostoevskys novels and short stories,
organized in terms of a complex typology of discourse-types.2124.
For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was the first genuine exponent of the fully
polyphonic novel which, as both a description of literary form and
an ethical ideal, had hitherto been only partially realized in
particular, marginalized genres within European literary history.
The crux of this polyphony is the suggestion that Dostoevskys
novels contain a plurality of unmerged consciousnesses, a mixture
of valid voices which are not completely subordinated to authorial
intentions or the heavy hand of the omniscient authorial
voice/narrational voice. That is, the characters voice is equally
as important and fully weighted as the authors own, and the former
cannot be simply viewed as an appendage of the latter. In
Dostoevskys novels, that is, the heros word possesses extraordinary
independence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were,
alongside the authors word and with the full and equally valid
voices of other characters (Bakhtin 1984: 7). This construction of
a series of autonomous yet interacting ideological worlds (as
embodied by particular characters) within the text affects every
element of the novel itselfplot, narration, style, imagery, or the
portrayal of time and space (the chronotope). For Bakhtin, the
subordination of such elements of the novel to the interaction of
consciousnesses was the essence of Dostoevskys artistic
genius:Dostoevsky, like Goethes Prometheus, creates not voiceless
slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing
alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even
of rebelling against him. A plurality of independent and unmerged
voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid
voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevskys novels.
What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and
fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single
authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses,
with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not
merged in the unity of the event. Dostoevskys major heroes are, by
the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of
authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly
signifying discourse. [] The consciousness of a character is given
as someone elses consciousness, another consciousness, yet at the
same time it is not turned into an object, is not closed, does not
become a simple object of the authors consciousness.
(1984:67)Bakhtin stresses that such a multiplicity of interacting
consciousnesses is a necessary but not a sufficient characteristic
of a genuine polyphony. The authors affirmation of a characters
right to be treated as a subject and not as an object must also
constitute the guiding artistic principle behind the verbal
structuring of the novel as a whole and the world beyond the text
it projects in other words, it must form the basis of a
fully-fledged dialogic world-view. Bakhtin suggests that the
maintenance of this dialogical principle can be accomplished
through the use of particular artistic devices which predestines
the character for freedom (a relative freedom, of course), and
incorporates him into the strict and carefully calculated plan of
the whole (1984: 13). Such devices aim at the rupturing and
dislocation of the seamless whole of the monologic world of
objects, events and consciousnesses through the introduction of
heterogeneous and multiform materials into the text. In the
polyphonic novel, elements of plot, characterization and so forth
are all structured to make dialogic opposition inescapable. The
result is an endless clash of unmerged souls, the construction of a
multiplicity of diverse yet interconnecting ideological worlds.
Bakhtin refers to this as the great dialogue, and he feels it is a
principle which inheres in every element of the polyphonic text
indeed, in all of social life itself: To be means to communicate
dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue,
by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an end. []
Everything in Dostoevskys novels tends toward dialogue, toward a
dialogic opposition, as if tending toward its center. All else is
means; dialogue is the end. A single voice ends nothing and
resolves nothing. Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum
for existence. (1984:252)Dostoevskys characters are therefore
ideologists in the fullest sense of the word. They express a
coherent Weltanschauung, what Bakhtin calls an integral ideational
position. Dostoevskys artistic goal is therefore not mimesis, the
faithful reproduction of an external reality, but rather the
representation of how this reality appears to the heros
self-consciousness. In Dostoevskys writings, then, we are not
privileged to see who the hero is, but rather how he is conscious
of himself; our act of artistic visualization occurs not before the
reality of the hero, but before a pure function of his awareness of
that reality (1984:48).26.Accordingly, Dostoevskys most significant
heroessuch as Ivan Karamazov, Raskolnikov, and Prince Myshkincannot
be understood as amalgams of fixed, static traits; nor are their
actions and thoughts wholly predictable. They not only react but
act; sensitized to their own surroundings and to their situation,
they are existential beings who are fully responsible for their own
deeds and words. Hence, Dostoevskys primary artistic strategy is
oriented toward the expression and fine-tuning of a characters
discourse, a discourse which is designed to galvanize characters,
provoke them, make them respond dialogically, thereby laying bare
[their] own final word as it interacts intensely with other
consciousnesses (Bakhtin 1984:54).Dostoevskys heroes are imbued
with the power to signify because they are privileged with a fully
weighted semantic position. If polyphony is to be fully realized,
then this direct and unmediated power to mean cannot be restricted
to the author. And it is precisely Dostoevskys approach which,
according to Bakhtin, represents a new and integral authorial
position which allows for an unprecedented method of visualizing
the human being in the sphere of art.22Dostoevskys heroes are
imbued with the power to signify because they are privileged with a
fully weighted semantic position. If polyphony is to be fully
realized, then this direct and unmediated power to mean cannot be
restricted to the author. And it is precisely Dostoevskys approach
which, according to Bakhtin, represents a new and integral
authorial position which allows for an unprecedented method of
visualizing the human being in the sphere of art.22
To be means to communicate
that is valuable for sociologists as well. 1984:32
The entire sphere of dialogic interaction itself, where disourse
lives an authentic life.
A shift from the phenomenological orientation of the Dostoevsky
book to historico literary approach. Through the understanding of
Bakhtins intellectual output during this period is of critical
importance in the appropriation of B themes and concepts for the
task of reconstructing the theory of ideology. Verbal ideological
sphere. Theis necessitates an exploration of his understading of
the dynamics of heteroglossia in the social world and how this
phenomenon is articulated with the novel form.
33.
To unify verbal-ideological world.
38.
45.
Grotesque
69.
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85.
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96
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Nietzsche