CHENNI

SHYAMSUNDAR KULAKARNI.B.E

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin  (November 17, 1895, Oryol – March 7, 1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician [1]  and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions (Marxism, semiotics, structuralism, religious criticism) and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s.[edit]Toward a Philosophy of the ActToward a Philosophy of the Act was first published in Russia in 1986 with the title K filosofii postupka. The manuscript, written between 1919–1921,was found in bad condition with pages missing and sections of text that were illegible. It is for this reason that this philosophical essay appears today as a fragment of an unfinished work.  Toward a Philosophy of the Act comprises only an introduction, of which the first few pages are missing, and part one of the full text. However, Bakhtin’s intentions for the work were not altogether lost, for he provided an outline in the introduction in which he stated that the essay was to contain four parts. [9] The first part of the essay deals with the analysis of the performed acts or deeds that comprise the actual world; "the world actually experienced, and not the merely thinkable world." For the three subsequent and unfinished parts of Toward a Philosophy of the Act Bakhtin states the topics he intends to discuss. He outlines that the second part will deal with aesthetic activity and the ethics of artistic creation; the third with the ethics of politics; and the fourth with religion.[10]

Toward a Philosophy of the Act reveals a young Bakhtin who is in the process of developing his moral philosophy by decentralizing the work of Kant. This text is one of Bakhtin’s early works concerningethics and aesthetics and it is here that Bakhtin lays out three claims regarding the acknowledgment of the uniqueness of one’s participation in Being:

1. I both actively and passively participate in Being.2. My uniqueness is given but it simultaneously exists only to the degree to which I actualize this uniqueness (in other

words, it is in the performed act and deed that has yet to be achieved).3. Because I am actual and irreplaceable I must actualize my uniqueness.

Bakhtin further states: "It is in relation to the whole actual unity that my unique thought arises from my unique place in Being."[11] Bakhtin deals with the concept of morality whereby he attributes the predominating legalistic notion of morality to human moral action. According to Bakhtin, the I cannot maintain neutrality toward moral and ethical demands which manifest themselves as one’s voice of consciousness.[12]

It is here also that Bakhtin introduces an "architectonic" or schematic model of the human psyche which consists of three components: "I-for-myself", "I-for-the-other", and "other-for-me". The I-for-myself is an unreliable source of identity, and Bakhtin argues that it is the I-for-the-other through which human beings develop a sense of identity because it serves as an amalgamation of the way in which others view me. Conversely, other-for-me describes the way in which others incorporate my perceptions of them into their own identities. Identity, as Bakhtin describes it here, does not belong merely to the individual, rather it is shared by all.[13]

[edit]Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics: polyphony and unfinalizabilityDuring his time in Leningrad, Bakhtin shifted his focus away from the philosophy characteristic of his early works and towards the notion of dialogue. It is at this time that he began his engagement with the work of  Fyodor Dostoevsky. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art is considered to be Bakhtin’s seminal work, and it is here that Bakhtin introduces three important concepts.First, is the concept of the unfinalizable self: individual people cannot be finalized, completely understood, known, or labeled. Though it is possible to understand people and to treat them as if they are completely known, Bakhtin’s conception of unfinalizability respects the possibility that a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. Readers may find that this conception reflects the idea of the "soul"; Bakhtin had strong roots in Christianity and in the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann Cohen, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual's potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul.Second, is the idea of the relationship between the self and others, or other groups. According to Bakhtin, every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. In an interview, Bakhtin once explained that,In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. ~New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993.As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on the self, not merely in terms of how a person comes to be, but also in how a person thinks and how a person sees him- or herself truthfully.

Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky's work a true representation of "polyphony", that is, many voices. Each character in Dostoevsky's work represents a voice that speaks for an individual self, distinct from others. This idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unfinalizability and self-and-others, since it is the unfinalizability of individuals that creates true polyphony.Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic concept of truth. He criticized the assumption that, if two people disagree, at least one of them must be in error. He challenged philosophers for whom plurality of minds is accidental and superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a sentence or a phrase. Instead, truth is a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically inconsistent, statements. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a single mind, it also cannot be expressed by "a single mouth". The polyphonic truth requires many simultaneous voices. Bakhtin does not mean to say that many voices carry partial truths that complement each other. A number of different voices do not make the truth if simply "averaged" or "synthesized". It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from untruth.When, in subsequent years, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art was translated into English and published in the West, Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept of "carnival" and the book was published with the slightly different title, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. According to Bakhtin, carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish and interact together. The carnival creates the "threshold" situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed and genuine dialogue becomes possible. The notion of a carnival was Bakhtin's way of describing Dostoevsky's polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is to say, the voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.[edit]Rabelais and His World: carnival and grotesqueDuring World War II Bakhtin submitted a dissertation on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais which was not defended until some years later. The controversial ideas discussed within the work caused much disagreement, and it was consequently decided that Bakhtin be denied his doctorate. Thus, due to its content,  Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was not published until 1965, at which time it was given the title, Rabelais and His World.[14]

A classic of Renaissance studies, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin explores Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel.[15] Bakhtin declares that, for centuries, Rabelais’s book had been misunderstood, and claimed that  Rabelais and His World clarified Rabelais’s intentions. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin concerns himself with the openness of Gargantua and Pantagruel; however, the book itself also serves as an example of such openness. Throughout the text, Bakhtin attempts two things: he seeks to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that, in the past, were either ignored or suppressed, and conducts an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language that was not. It is by means of this analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is carnival (carnivalesque) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body and the material bodily lower stratum.[16]

In his chapter on the history of laughter, Bakhtin advances the notion of its therapeutic and liberating force, arguing that in resisting hypocrisy "laughing truth... degraded power".[17]

[edit]The Dialogic Imagination: Chronotope, HeteroglossiaThe Dialogic Imagination (first published as a whole in 1975) is a compilation of four essays concerning language and the novel: "Epic and Novel" (1941), "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse", "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel", and "Discourse in the Novel". It is through the essays contained within The Dialogic Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the concepts ofheteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope, making a significant contribution to the realm of literary scholarship.[18] Bakhtin explains the generation of meaning through the "primacy of context over text" (heteroglossia), the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia) and the relation between utterances (intertextuality).[19][20] Heteroglossia is "the base condition governing the operation of meaning in anyutterance."[20][21] To make an utterance means to "appropriate the words of others and populate them with one's own intention."[20][22] Bakhtin's deep insights on dialogicality represent a substantive shift from views on the nature of language and knowledge by major thinkers as Ferdinand de Saussure and Immanuel Kant.[23][24]

In "Epic and Novel", Bakhtin demonstrates the novel’s distinct nature by contrasting it with the epic. By doing so, Bakhtin shows that the novel is well-suited to the post-industrial civilization in which we live because it flourishes on diversity. It is this same diversity that the epic attempts to eliminate from the world. According to Bakhtin, the novel as a genre is unique in that it is able to embrace, ingest, and devour other genres while still maintaining its status as a novel. Other genres, however, cannot emulate the novel without damaging their own distinct identity.[25]

"From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" is a less traditional essay in which Bakhtin reveals how various different texts from the past have ultimately come together to form the modern novel.[26]

"Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" introduces Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. This essay applies the concept in order to further demonstrate the distinctive quality of the novel. [26] The word chronotope literally means

"time space" and is defined by Bakhtin as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature."[27] For the purpose of his writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is forced to make use of the organizing categories of the real world in which he lives. For this reason chronotope is a concept that engages reality.[28]

The final essay, "Discourse in the Novel", is one of Bakhtin’s most complete statements concerning his philosophy of language. It is here that Bakhtin provides a model for a history of discourse and introduces the concept of heteroglossia.[26] The term heteroglossia refers to the qualities of a language that are extralinguistic, but common to all languages. These include qualities such as perspective, evaluation, and ideological positioning. In this way most languages are incapable of neutrality, for every word is inextricably bound to the context in which it exists.[29]

[edit]Speech Genres and Other Late EssaysIn Speech Genres and Other Late Essays Bakhtin moves away from the novel and concerns himself with the problems of method and the nature of culture. There are six essays that comprise this compilation: "Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff", "The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism", "The Problem of Speech Genres", "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis", "From Notes Made in 1970-71," and "Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences.""Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff" is a transcript of comments made by Bakhtin to a reporter from a monthly journal called Novy Mir that was widely read by Soviet intellectuals. The transcript expresses Bakhtin’s opinion of literary scholarship whereby he highlights some of its shortcomings and makes suggestions for improvement.[30]

"The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism" is a fragment from one of Bakhtin’s lost books. The publishing house to which Bakhtin had submitted the full manuscript was blown up during the German invasion and Bakhtin was in possession of only the prospectus. However, due to a shortage of paper, Bakhtin began using this remaining section to roll cigarettes. So only a portion of the opening section remains. This remaining section deals primarily with Goethe.[31]

"The Problem of Speech Genres" deals with the difference between Saussurean linguistics and language as a living dialogue (translinguistics). In a relatively short space, this essay takes up a topic about which Bakhtin had planned to write a book, making the essay a rather dense and complex read. It is here that Bakhtin distinguishes between literary and everyday language. According to Bakhtin, genres exist not merely in language, but rather in communication. In dealing with genres, Bakhtin indicates that they have been studied only within the realm of  rhetoric and literature, but each discipline draws largely on genres that exist outside both rhetoric and literature. These extraliterary genres have remained largely unexplored. Bakhtin makes the distinction between primary genres and secondary genres, whereby primary genres legislate those words, phrases, and expressions that are acceptable in everyday life, and secondary genres are characterized by various types of text such as legal, scientific, etc.[32]

"The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis" is a compilation of the thoughts Bakhtin recorded in his notebooks. These notes focus mostly on the problems of the text, but various other sections of the paper discuss topics he has taken up elsewhere, such as speech genres, the status of the author, and the distinct nature of the human sciences. However, "The Problem of the Text" deals primarily with dialogue and the way in which a text relates to its context. Speakers, Bakhtin claims, shape an utterance according to three variables: the object of discourse, the immediate addressee, and a  superaddressee. This is what Bakhtin describes as the tertiary nature of dialogue.[33]

"From Notes Made in 1970-71" appears also as a collection of fragments extracted from notebooks Bakhtin kept during the years of 1970 and 1971. It is here that Bakhtin discusses interpretation and its endless possibilities. According to Bakhtin, humans have a habit of making narrow interpretations, but such limited interpretations only serve to weaken the richness of the past.[34]

The final essay, "Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences", originates from notes Bakhtin wrote during the mid-seventies and is the last piece of writing Bakhtin produced before he died. In this essay he makes a distinction between dialectic and dialogics and comments on the difference between the text and the aesthetic object. It is here also, that Bakhtin differentiates himself from theFormalists, who, he felt, underestimated the importance of content while oversimplifying change, and the Structuralists, who too rigidly adhered to the concept of "code."[35]

[edit]Disputed texts

Some of the works which bear the names of Bakhtin's close friends V. N. Vološinov and P. N. Medvedev have been attributed to Bakhtin – particularly The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship andMarxism and Philosophy of Language. These claims originated in the early 1970s and received their earliest full articulation in English in Clark and Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin. In the years since then, however, most scholars have come to agree that Vološinov and Medvedev ought to be considered the true authors of these works. Although Bakhtin undoubtedly influenced these scholars and may even have had a hand in composing the works attributed to them, it now seems clear that if it was necessary to attribute authorship of these works to one person, Vološinov and Medvedev respectively should receive credit.[edit]Influence

He is known today for his interest in a wide variety of subjects, ideas, vocabularies, and periods, as well as his use of authorial disguises, and for his influence (alongside György Lukács) on the growth of Western scholarship on the novel as a premiere literary genre. As a result of the breadth of topics with which he dealt, Bakhtin has influenced such Western schools of theory as Neo-Marxism, Structuralism, and Semiotics. However, his influence on such groups has, somewhat paradoxically, resulted in narrowing the scope of Bakhtin’s work. According to Clark and Holquist, rarely do those who incorporate Bakhtin’s ideas into theories of their own appreciate his work in its entirety.[36]

While Bakhtin is traditionally seen as a literary critic, there can be no denying his impact on the realm of rhetorical theory. Among his many theories and ideas Bakhtin indicates that style is a developmental process, occurring both within the user of language and language itself. His work instills in the reader an awareness of tone and expression that arises from the careful formation of verbal phrasing. By means of his writing, Bakhtin has enriched the experience of verbal and written expression which ultimately aids the formal teaching of writing. [37] Some even suggest that Bakhtin introduces a new meaning to rhetoric because of his tendency to reject the separation of language and ideology.[38]

Bakhtin has been compared to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

HeteroglossiaThe term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single "linguistic code". In Greek hetero = different + glōssa = tongue, language. In this way the term translates theRussian разноречие [raznorechie] (literally "different-speech-ness"), which was introduced by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Слово в романе [Slovo v romane], published inEnglish as "Discourse in the Novel."Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel originates in the coexistence of, and conflict between, different types of speech: the speech of characters, the speech of narrators, and even the speech of the author. He defines heteroglossia as "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way." Bakhtin identifies the direct narrative of the author, rather than dialogue between characters, as the primary location of this conflict.

Contents [hide]1   Languages as points of view 2   The hybrid utterance 3   Influence of the concept

[edit]Languages as points of view

Bakhtin viewed the modern novel as a literary form best suited for the exploitation of heteroglossia, in direct contrast to epic poetry (and, in a lesser degree, poetry in general). The linguistic energy of the novel was seen in its expression of the conflict between voices through their adscription to different elements in the novel's discourse.Any language, in Bakhtin's view, stratifies into many voices: "social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions." This diversity of voice is, Bakhtin asserts, the defining characteristic of the novel as a genre.Traditional stylistics, like epic poetry, do not share the trait of heteroglossia. In Bakhtin's words, "poetry depersonalizes 'days' in language, while prose, as we shall see, often deliberately intensifies difference between them..."Extending his argument, Bakhtin proposes that all languages represent a distinct point of view on the world, characterized by its own meaning and values. In this view, language is "shot through with intentions and accents," and thus there are no neutral words. Even the most unremarkable statement possesses a taste, whether of a profession, a party, a generation, a place or a time. To Bakhtin, words do not exist until they are spoken, and that moment they are printed with the signature of the speaker.Bakhtin identifies the act of speech, or of writing, as a literary-verbal performance, one that requires speakers or authors to take a position, even if only by choosing the dialect in which they will speak. Separate languages are often identified with separate circumstances. Bakhtin gives an example of an illiterate peasant, who speaks Church Slavonic to God, speaks to his family in their own peculiar dialect, sings songs in yet a third, and attempts to emulate officious high-class dialect when he dictates petitions to the local government. The prose writer, Bakhtin argues, must welcome and incorporate these many languages into his work.[edit]The hybrid utterance

The hybrid utterance, as defined by Bakhtin, is a passage that employs only a single speaker—the author, for example—but one or more kinds of speech. The juxtaposition of the two different speeches brings with it a contradiction and conflict in belief systems.In examination of the English comic novel, particularly the works of Charles Dickens, Bakhtin identifies examples of his argument. Dickens parodies both the 'common tongue' and the language of Parliament or high-class banquets,

using concealed languages to create humor. In one passage, Dickens shifts from his authorial narrative voice into a formalized, almost epic tone while describing the work of an unremarkable bureaucrat; his intent is to parody the self-importance and vainglory of the bureaucrat's position. The use of concealed speech, without formal markers of a speaker change, is what allows the parody to work. It is, in Bakhtin's parlance, a hybrid utterance. In this instance the conflict is between the factual narrative and the biting hyperbole of the new, epic/formalistic tone.Bakhtin goes on to discuss the interconnectedness of conversation. Even a simple dialogue, in his view, is full of quotations and references, often to a general "everyone says" or "I heard that.." Opinion and information are transmitted by way of reference to an indefinite, general source. By way of these references, humans selectively assimilate the discourse of others and make it their own.Bakhtin identifies a specific type of discourse, the "authoritative discourse," which demands to be assimilated by the reader or listener; examples might be religious dogma, or scientific theory, or a popular book. This type of discourse is viewed as past, finished, hierarchically superior, and therefore demands "unconditional allegiance" rather than accepting interpretation. Because of this, Bakhtin states that authoritative discourse plays an insignificant role in the novel. Because it is not open to interpretation, it cannot enter into hybrid utterance.Bakhtin concludes by arguing that the role of the novel is to draw the authoritative into question, and to allow that which was once considered certain to be conflicted and open to interpretation. In effect, novels not only function through heteroglossia, but must promote it; to do otherwise is an artistic failure.[edit]Influence of the concept

Bakhtin's view of heteroglossia has been often employed in the context of the postmodern critique of the perceived teleological and authoritarian character of modernist art and culture. In particular, the latter's strong disdain for popular forms of art and literature — archetypically expressed in Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry — has been criticised as a proponent ofmonoglossia; practitioners of cultural studies have used Bakhtin's conceptual framework to theorise the critical reappropriation of mass-produced entertainment forms by the public.Dorothy Hale applied the concept of heteroglossia to African-American literature in "Bakhtin in African American Literary Theory," pointing to a slave narrator remembering his bondage or the racial narrative of the blues as distinctly African-American voices that come into conflict with other dialects. In Hale's view, heteroglossia is similar to  W. E. B. Dubois' view of the African American double consciousness, torn between the American experience and African heritage. African American literature, by nature, contains a powerful and persistent heteroglossia. To Hale this is not simply a literary technique but a sign of African-American linguistic identity.Hale criticizes Dubois for limiting double consciousness to African-Americans alone, identifying African-American double consciousness as a special case of universal heteroglossia, and comparing the plight of the African-American to Bakhtin's hypothetical peasant. To Hale, the fact that heteroglossia is a social construction offers hope for equality to African-Americans because it implies that they are different and inequal only because society makes them so, rather than because of any inherent trait.

DialogicThe English terms dialogic and dialogism often refer to the concept used by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin in his work of literary theory, The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin contrasts the dialogic and the "monologic" work of literature. The dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors. It does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but informs and is continually informed by the previous work. Dialogic literature is in communication with multiple works. This is not merely a matter of influence, for the dialogue extends in both directions, and the previous work of literature is as altered by the dialogue as the present one is. In this sense, Bakhtin's "dialogic" is analogous to T. S. Eliot's ideas in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," where he holds that "the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past." [1] The influence occurs at the level of the individual word or phrase as much as it does the work and even the oeuvre or collection of works. A German cannot use the word "fatherland" or the phrase "blood and soil" without (possibly unintentionally) also echoing (or, Bakhtin would say "refracting") the meaning that those terms took on under National Socialism. Every word has a history of usage to which it responds, and anticipates a future response.The term 'dialogic', however, does not just apply to literature. For Bakhtin, all  language - indeed, all thought - appeared dialogic. This means that everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response. We never, in other words, speak in a vacuum. As a result, all language (and the ideas which language contains and communicates) is dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world. That said, Bakhtin also emphasized certain uses of language that maximized the dialogic nature of words, and other uses that attempted to limit or restric their polyvocality. At one extreme is novelistic discourse, particularly that of a Dostoevsky (or Mark Twain) in which various registers and languages are allowed to interact and respond to each other. At the other extreme would be the military order (or 1984 newspeak) which attempts to minimize all orientations of the work toward the past or the future, and which prompts no response but obedience.When scholars in France (notably Julia Kristeva), the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s rediscovered Bakhtin's work, it seemed to fit with the then-nascent concepts of " intertextuality". European social

psychologists also applied Bakhtin's work to the study of human social experience, preferring it as a more dynamic alternative to Cartesian monologicality.

Code-switchingIn linguistics, code-switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals - people who speak more than one language - sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other. Thus, code-switching is the use of more than one linguistic variety in a manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety.Code-switching is distinct from other language contact phenomena, such as borrowing, pidgins and creoles, loan translation (calques), and language transfer (language interference). Speakers form and establish a pidgin language when two or more speakers who do not speak a common language form an intermediate, third language. On the other hand, speakers practice code-switching when they are each fluent in both languages.  Code mixing is a thematically related term, but the usage of the terms code-switching and code-mixing varies. Some scholars use either term to denote the same practice, while others apply code-mixing to denote the formal linguistic properties of said language-contact phenomena, and code-switching to denote the actual, spoken usages by multilingual persons. [1][2][3]

In the 1940s and the 1950s many scholars called code-switching a sub-standard language usage. [4] Since the 1980s, however, most scholars have recognised it is a normal, natural product of bilingual and multilingual language use.[5]

The term code-switching is also used outside the field of linguistics. Some scholars of literature use the term to describe literary styles which include elements from more than one language, as in novels by Chinese-American, Anglo-Indian, or Latino/a writers.[6] In popular usage code-switching is sometimes used to refer to relatively stable informal mixtures of two languages, such as Spanglish or Franponais.[7] Both in popular usage and in sociolinguistic scholarship, the name code-switching is sometimes used to refer to switching among dialects, styles or registers, such as that practiced by speakers of African American Vernacular English as they move from less formal to more formal settings.[8]

Contents1   Social motivations for code-switching 1.1   Markedness Model

1.2   Communication Accommodation Theory

1.3   Code-switching and Diglossia

2   Mechanics of code-switching 3   Types of switching 4   Examples of code-switching

Social motivations for code-switching

Code-switching relates to, and sometimes indexes social-group membership in bilingual and multilingual communities. Some sociolinguists describe the relationships between code-switching behaviours and class, ethnicity, and other social positions.[9] In addition, scholars in interactional linguistics and conversation analysis have studied code-switching as a means of structuring talk in interaction. [10] Analyst Peter Auer suggests that code-switching does not simply reflect social situations, but that it is a means to create social situations.[11]

Markedness ModelThe Markedness Model, developed by Carol Myers-Scotton, is one of the more complete theories of code-switching motivations. It posits that language users are rational, and choose (speak) a language that clearly marks their rights and obligations, relative to other speakers, in the conversation and its setting. [12] When there is no clear, unmarked language choice, speakers practice code-switching to explore possible language choices. Many sociolinguists, however, object to the Markedness Model’s postulation that language-choice is entirely rational.[13][14]

Communication Accommodation TheoryThe Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), developed by Howard Giles, professor of communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, seeks to explain the cognitive reasons for code-switching, and other changes in speech, as a person seeks either to emphasize or to minimize the social differences between him- or herself and the other person(s) in conversation. Prof. Giles posits that when speakers seek approval in a social situation they are likely to converge their speech with that of the other person speaking. This can include, but is not limited to, the language of choice, accent, dialect, and para-linguistic features used in the conversation. In contrast to convergence, speakers might also engage in divergent speech, with which an individual person emphasizes the social distance between him- or herself and other speakers by using speech with linguistic features characteristic of his or her own group.Code-switching and DiglossiaMain articles: Domain specificity and metaphorical code-switching and DiglossiaIn a diglossic situation, some topics and situations are better suited to one language over another. Joshua Fishman proposes a domain-specific code-switching model [15] (later refined by Blom andGumperz)[16] wherein bilingual speakers choose which code to speak depending on where they are and what they are discussing. For example, a child who is a bilingual Spanish-English speaker might speak Spanish at home and English in class, but Spanish at recess. [17]

Mechanics of code-switching

Code-switching mostly occurs where the syntaxes of the languages align in a sentence; thus, it is uncommon to switch from English to French after an adjective and before a noun, because, in French, adjectives usually follow nouns. Even unrelated languages often align syntactically at a relative clause boundary or at the boundary of other sentence sub-structures.Linguists have made significant effort toward defining the difference between borrowing (loanword usage) and code-switching; generally, borrowing occurs in the lexicon, while code-switching occurs at either the syntax level or the utterance-construction level.[18][19][20]

In studying the syntactic and morphological patterns of language alternation, linguists have postulated specific grammatical rules and specific syntactic boundaries for where code-switching might occur. None of these suggestions is universally accepted, however, and linguists have offered apparent counter-examples to each proposed constraint. [1]

[21] Some proposed constraints are: The Free-morpheme Constraint: code-switching cannot occur between bound morphemes. [22]

The Equivalence Constraint: code-switching can occur only in positions where "the order of any two sentence elements, one before and one after the switch, is not excluded in either language." Thus, the sentence: "I like you porque eres simpatico." ("I like you because you are likable.") is allowed because it obeys the relative clause formation rules of Spanish and English. [22]

The Closed-class Constraint: closed class items (pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.), cannot be switched.[23]

The Matrix Language Frame model distinguishes the roles of the participant languages.[24]

The Functional Head Constraint: code-switching cannot occur between a functional head (a complementizer, a determiner, an inflection, etc.) and its complement (sentence, noun-phrase, verb-phrase). [25]

Note that some theories, such as the Closed-class Constraint, the Matrix Language Frame model, and the Functional Head Constraint, which make general predictions based upon specific presumptions about the nature of syntax, are controversial among linguists positing alternative theories. In contrast, descriptions based on empirical analyses of corpora, such as the Equivalence Constraint, are relatively independent of syntactic theory, but the code-switching patterns they describe vary considerably among speech communities, even among those sharing the same language pairs.[26]

Types of switching

Scholars use different names for various types of code-switching. Intersentential switching occurs outside the sentence or the clause level (i.e. at sentence or clause boundaries).[27] It is

sometimes called "extrasentential" switching.[28]

Intra-sentential switching occurs within a sentence or a clause.[27][28]

Tag-switching is the switching of either a tag phrase or a word, or both, from language-B to language-A, (common intra-sentential switches).[27]

Intra-word switching occurs within a word, itself, such as at a morpheme boundary.[28]

Examples of code-switching

Spanish and English — Researcher Ana Celia Zentella offers this example from her work with Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilingual speakers in New York City.[7] In this example, Marta and her younger sister, Lolita, speak Spanish and English with Zentella (ACZ) outside of their apartment building.Lolita: Oh, I could stay with Ana?Marta: — but you could ask papi and mami to see if you could come down.Lolita: OK.Marta: Ana, if I leave her here would you send her upstairs when you leave?ACZ: I’ll tell you exactly when I have to leave, at ten o’clock. Y son las nueve y cuarto. ("And it’s nine fifteen.")Marta: Lolita, te voy a dejar con Ana. ("I’m going to leave you with Ana.") Thank you, Ana.Zentella explains that the children of the predominantly Puerto Rican neighbourhood speak both English and Spanish: "Within the children’s network, English predominated, but code-switching from English to Spanish occurred once every three minutes, on average."[7]

Hopi and Tewa — Researcher Paul Kroskrity offers the following example of code-switching by of three elder Arizona Tewa men, who are trilingual in Tewa, Hopi, and English.[29] They are discussing the selection of a site for a new high school in the eastern Hopi Reservation:Speaker A [in Hopi]: Tututqaykit qanaanawakna. ("Schools were not wanted.")Speaker B [in Tewa]: Wédít’ókánk’egena’adi imbí akhonidi. ("They didn’t want a school on their land.")Speaker C [in Tewa]: Naembí eeyae nąeląemo díbít’ó’ámmí kąayį’į wédimu::di. ("It’s better if our children go to school right here, rather than far away.")In their two-hour conversation, the three men primarily spoke Tewa; however, when Speaker A addresses the Hopi Reservation as a whole, he code-switches to Hopi. His speaking Hopi when talking of Hopi-related matters is a conversational norm in the Arizona Tewa speech community. Kroskrity reports that these Arizona Tewa men, who culturally identify themselves as Hopi and Tewa, use the different languages to linguistically construct and maintain their discrete ethnic identities.

Carnivalesque is a term coined by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, which refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos.Bakhtin traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival, itself related to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival originally of the sub-deacons of the cathedral, held about the time of theFeast of the Circumcision (1 January), in which the humbler cathedral officials burlesqued the sacred ceremonies, releasing "the natural lout beneath the cassock."[1]

The Feast of Fools had its chief vogue in the French cathedrals, but there are a few English records of it, notably in Lincoln Cathedral and Beverley Minster. Today in the USA, carnival is primarily associated with Mardi Gras, a time of revelry that immediately precedes the Christian celebration of Lent; during the modern Mardi Gras, ordinary life and its rules and regulations are temporarily suspended and reversed, such that the riot of Carnival is juxtaposed with the control of the Lenten season, although Bakhtin argues in Rabelais and His World that we should not compare modern Mardi Gras with his Medieval Carnival. He argues that the latter is a powerful creative event, whereas the former is only a spectacle. Bakhtin goes on to suggest that the separation of participants and spectators was detrimental to the potency of Carnival.In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin likens the carnivalesque in literature to the type of activity that often takes place in the carnivals of popular culture. In the carnival, as we have seen, social hierarchies of everyday life—their solemnities and pieties and etiquettes, as well as all ready-made truths—are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies. Thus, fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell).Through the carnival and carnivalesque literature the world is turned-upside-down (W.U.D.), ideas and truths are endlessly tested and contested, and all demand equal dialogic status. The “jolly relativity” of all things is proclaimed by alternative voices within the carnivalized literary text that de-privileged the authoritative voice of the hegemony through their mingling of “high culture” with the profane. For Bakhtin it is within literary forms like the novel that one finds the site of resistance to authority and the place where cultural, and potentially political, change can take place.For Bakhtin, carnivalization has a long and rich historical foundation in the genre of the ancient Menippean satire. In Menippean satire, the three planes of Heaven (Olympus), the Underworld, and Earth are all treated to the logic and activity of Carnival. For example, in the underworld earthly inequalites are dissolved; emperors lose their crowns and meet on equal terms with beggars. This intentional ambiguity allows for the seeds of the “polyphonic” novel, in which narratologic and character voices are set free to speak subversively or shockingly, but without the writer of the text stepping between character and reader.One of the earliest films to employ the carnivalesque was the 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), directed by Satyajit Ray.[2] Carnivalesque is also a prevailing theme in Angela Carter's last novel Wise Children.

Major WorksBakhtin is credited with introducing several seminal concepts to the field of literary theory. Contemporary critics comment that in the earliest works Bakhtin's ideas proved to be precursors to much modern structuralist and poststructuralist theory. In The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, Bakhtin criticized Russian Formalism's essentialist approach to literature, positing instead a sociological materialist method of study.  Marxism and the Philosophy of Languageoutlines Bakhtin's sociohistorical theory of language, criticizing Ferdinand de Saussure's biophysiological linguistics.Freudianism: A Marxist Critiqueevaluates Freudian psychoanalysis from a Marxist materialist perspective. In his later works, Bakhtin expanded upon his sociohistorical focus—which he would eventually term "heteroglossia"—applying it to literature as well as linguistics. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poeticspresents the ideas of polyphony and dialogism. Contending that Dostoevsky created a new kind of novel by giving each of his characters an individual voice unmarked by his own beliefs and opinions, Bakhtin believed that Dostoevsky's work proved that authors could escape their own reality in order to create another. The various voices of the novel together form what Bakhtin termed "dialogism"—the democratic and polyphonic intermingling of "high" and "low" forms of language and culture that reflects the heteroglot society at large. The concept of dialogism appears in most of Bakhtin's works and forms the basis of many of his literary and cultural theories. In  Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin examined medieval and Renaissance European culture through an analysis of François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. Using the concepts of carnival and the culture of laughter—both of which helped the underclasses in medieval and Renaissance times to parody official languages and established notions of high culture, as in, according to Bakhtin, Rabelais's free display of the human body—Bakhtin asserted that the carnival liberated and empowered those in the lower strata of society. The collection of essays entitled  The Dialogic Imagination outlines Bakhtin's theory of the novel and includes much of his language theory, particularly in the essay "Discourse in the Novel."

Critical Reception

After decades of suppression in Soviet Russia, Bakhtinian theory emerged in the West in the early 1960s as a major force in modern linguistics. Characterized by an aversion to the more systematized theories of such thinkers as Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, Bakhtin's concepts favored contextual openness and dialogue. Tzvetan Todorov and other critics have perceived this as evidence of an inherent lack of structure and therefore a major flaw in Bakhtin's work. Other critics such as Michael Holquist contend that Bakhtin's approach, while less structured than others, is not without order and reflects his conception of the novel: Bakhtin's "concept of language stands in relation to others … much as the novel stands in opposition to other, more formalized genres. That is, the novel—as Bakhtin more than anyone has taught us to see—does not lack its organizing principles, but they are of a different order from those regulating sonnets or odes." Controversy has also surrounded Bakhtin's theory of the carnival. Many scholars believe that the carnival primarily served not as a form of liberation and empowerment for the lower classes—as Bakhtin asserted—but as a practical method supported by the upper classes for defusing the frustrations of the underclasses, thus squelching real revolutionary fervor. Nonetheless, many critics have praised Bakhtin's attempts to "democratize" literature and theory, maintaining that his depiction of literature as a product and reflection of popular rather than high or elite culture is emblematic of humanistic social ideals. Stanley Aronowitz has written: "Bakhtin is the social theorist of difference, who, unlike Derrida and Foucault, gives top billing to historical agents and agency. For Bakhtin, there are no privileged protagonists, no final solutions, only a panoply of divergent voices which somehow make their own music."

Bakhtin's Theory Of Language From The Standpoint Of Modern Science1.Preliminary Remarks. The present paper studies the relevance of Bakhtin’s theory of language and discourse for modern linguistics and trans(=meta)linguistics and for the verbal communication theory. Although Bakhtin by no means was only a professional linguist, he was well-read in modern linguistic literature (some names important for him are mentioned below) and had good philological expertise in Greek, Latin, Romance, German, Russian and Church Slavonic texts. He approached language from the point of view of some of his general philosophical anthropological concepts (such as the idea of the Other and the dialogical principle; the opposition of official and unofficial elements of culture and the role of carnival). Language played an important part in his thinking about humanities, verbal art and particularly novel. He belonged to those great thinkers of the century (as, for instance, Wittgenstein, Russell, Bohr, Florensky, Spet) whose philosophy had a characteristic “linguistic turn” seen also in great poets of the period (Mandel’stam, T.S.Eliot, Brodsky). Bakhtin’s ideas influenced modern studies of language and helped to redefine the borders of linguistics itself. I believe that in XXI century some of these ideas might be fully appreciated and integrated into linguistic studies after the latter cease to be restricted to a dogmatic point of view of one school only (for instance, generative grammar at some American University departments).The main difficulty in understanding Bakhtin's early views on linguistic theory consists of the peculiar mixed character of our sources. As it is also in the discussion on Freud, early Bakhtin' s thoughts on language are known only through his writings in disguise (where a mixture with Marxist point of view was made necessary by the goal of the whole work). But in this case it is possible also to study writings that Bakhtin wrote much later comparing them to his early work.2.Bakhtinian Dialogue with Saussure. Bakhtin's attitude towards pre-structural algebraic view on system of language particularly in Saussure's Course of general Linguistics was determined by his dialogical principle. It is a general approach, valid in different spheres. Bakhtin applied it to language. This original vuew completely transformed the notional background of linguistics. He opposed all the main positions of Saussure' s theory[1]. Bakhtin rejects the point of view according to which there are only a unitary language (langue) and an individual speech (parole). To him this notion is explained by the history of European languages and does not imply universal linguistic laws: «The victory of one reigning language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of languages, their enslavement, the process of illuminating them with the True Word, the incorporation of barbarians and lower social strata into a unitary language of culture and truth, the canonization of ideological systems, philology with its methods of studying and teaching dead languages, languages that were by that very fact «unities», Indo-European linguistics with its focus of attention, directed away from language plurality to a single proto-language- all this determined the content and power of the category of «unitary language» in linguistic and stylistic thought, and determined its creative, style-shaping role in the majority of the poetic genres that coalesced in the channel formed by those same centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life»[2]. This general scheme seems particularly important now when the number of endangered languages grows rapidly (according to a widely accepted prediction no more than 600 languages out of 6.000 will survive in the nearest future) and such an influential theory as generative grammar has been based originally on one unitary language only (without paying much attention to heteroglossia inside American English).Another aspect of Saussure's theory that Bakhtin opposes is connected to the nature of linguistic sign. An isolated linguistic sign does not exist in reality. A monological utterance (that according to Bakhtin, was a normal linguistic correspondence to the other monological institutions of the societies of his time) is «already an abstraction». «Any utterance- the finished, written utterance not excepted- makes response to something and is calculated to be responded in turn» 1. To translate it into the terms of linguistic theories that appeared after Bakhtin's main works on language had been published, one may say that for him performance and not competence is crucial. In other words, he

considered a language system to be secondary whereas the text had primary significance. Bakhtin's critique of Saussure's linguistic theory is partly similar to his critique of the Formalist approach to literature. In both cases he opposes a systematic description that, as he supposed, lead to simplistic formulae. One may attempt to compare the opposition of Saussure and Bakhtin to that of Hilbert and Goedel. No matter how attractive Hilbert's program of developing mathematics as a purely formal system based on initial set of axioms might seem, according to Goedel's theorem a complete non-contradictory formalization of an even elementary relatively simple field of arithmetical knowledge is impossible. Yet even after Goedel's theorem had been proven, such great structuralists as Kuryłowicz suggested Hilbert's program of axiomatization as a pattern to be followed by linguists. An exact parallel of Hilbert's views of mathematical systems and those of Saussure concerning linguistic patterns is seen particularly in their understanding of signs as the main elements. When Bakhtin did not approve Saussure he was arguing just against those aspects of his system that make it similar to a mathematical one (in some aspects, as in Saussurean study of 'equations' of Indo-European ablaut that approach lead to magnificent discoveries, as brilliantly shown by Hjelmslev).In a retrospect view one may distinguish two main trends in linguistics of the XXth century. The dominant line of research followed Saussure or appeared to be parallel to his work. On this way elaboration of formal and/or structural principles has been achieved by the Prague and Copenhagen linguistic circles as well as in descriptive linguistics and generative grammar as well as in related fields of computational and mathematical linguistics. But scholars like Leo Spitzer (who was Bakhtin's favorite linguist) and other philologists influenced by Vossler and Croce opposed this purely formal view finding it hostile to cultural and aesthetic apprehension of verbal texts[3]. Bakhtin was influenced by the school of Vossler . His views on Croce may be compared to the thoughts of Sapir expressed approximately at the same time. Particularly important for Bakhtin were Spitzer’s stylistic studies. Present-day poststructuralist movement has found in Bakhtin some arguments speaking in favor of the second approach. But as Bakhtin's views (particularly in his later period) were sufficiently broad, semioticians (partly developing Saussurean ideas) have also seen in Bakhtin their predecessor. In the future one may hope for a synthetic theory that would unite some achievements of post-Saussurean studies of linguistic signs and the aspects of verbal texts discovered by Bakhtin and his followers. The two approaches seem to be complementary in the sense of Niels Bohr's notion of complementarity. If a scholar is interested in a set of linguistic units and features that characterize grammar as such (for instance, in the main stream of comparative historical reconstruction), he or she would attempt to concentate on «langue» in Saussurean sense. If utterances or verbal texts are the chief object of research, Bakhtinian point of view would prevail. The XXth century stressed differences between opposing points of view leaving a possible synthesis to next generations. To use another physical metaphor, the great unifying theory yet to be built should unite a macro-world of a language system (langue) and a micro-world of an utterance or a text.3.Metalinguistics: study of utterances and texts. Mikhail Bakhtin was the first to discover a difference between an abstract linguistic system of signs and a concrete utterance in which each sign gets another function due to its role in the whole of discourse. Twenty years later this distinction was rediscovered by the great French linguist Émile Benveniste. Benveniste suggested that a purely semiotic approach to language would be possible only insofar as linguistic signs are concerned. The structure of the texts should be studied by semantics. The gap between system and text had constituted the main point of Benveniste’s semiotic theory of language[4] that influenced later research[5].In his early works Bakhtin stressed the importance of purely linguistic study of texts (utterances) that are larger than a complex sentence. Surveying the underdeveloped fields of linguistics he wrote: «nothing has been worked out yet in the department concerned with the study of large verbal entities- long utterances from everyday life, dialogue, speech, treatise, novel, and so on- for these utterances … can be and must be defined and studied in purely linguistic terms, as verbal phenomena. The examination of these phenomena in old handbooks of poetics and rhetoric and in their contemporary variant- descriptive poetics- cannot be considered scientific owing to … mixing of the linguistic point of view with those completely alien to it- logical, psychological, aesthetic. The syntax of large verbal wholes (or- composition as as a department of linguistics, as distinct from composition which takes into account an artistic or a scientific task) still awaits its foundation and validation: scientifically, linguistics has still not moved beyond the complex sentence. The complex sentence is the most extended phenomenon of language that has been scientifically examined by linguistics: one gets the impression that the methodically pure language of linguistics suddenly comes to an end at this point, and what begins at once is science, poetry, and so on, and yet the purely linguistic analysis can be continued further, no matter how difficult it is and how tempting it may be to introduce here points of view that are alien to linguistics»[6]. This field of research (later called metalinguistics by Bakhtin and translinguistics by Roland Barthes[7]) studying discourse as a field much broader than a sentence (which has remained the upper limit of a traditional linguistic study) became quite popular among the scholars at our time.In the studies of Russian grammar of the 1950-ies among the first to investigate “units that are larger than phrases” (sverxfraznye edinstva) was Leonid A. Bulakhovsky[8]. Nikolay S. Pospelov tried to study “complex syntactic wholes “ (slozhnye sintaksicheskie celye ; each of such units might include several sentences) as a problem of Russian and general linguistics[9]. But his example shows how difficult it is to separate a purely linguistic approach to syntactic wholes (on which Bakhtin insisted in his early work) from the one based on poetics. Not only types of such wholes depend on the genre and verse structure. Practically for each of larger poetical compositions by Pushkin one has to

study the problem separately. A theoretical thesis on the necessity of a strict distinction between these two approaches has not been supported by concrete studies (see below on the relation between linguistics and poetics).On the verge of linguistics of text and poetics was also Vinokur’s pioneering study of the language of  The Misfortune of being Clever[10]. In it Vinokur studied the structure of theatrical cues (that may contain several dozen lines each).In his pioneering studies of larger syntactical units Nikolay S. Pospelov has shown that in Russian (as in Serbo-Croatian according to Belich’ earlier work the results of which had been summed up by Pospelov[11]) it is impossible to speak about the value of verbal tenses without describing the whole of discourse. Similar methods were applied to determine the value of Japanese verbal forms by Nikolay Syromiatnikov[12]. In 1960-ies and 1970-ies linguistics of text became one of the established fields of the Russian science of language[13]. Partly parallel ideas were seen in the works of American linguists developing discourse theory (starting with Zellig Harris’ works of the 1950-ies and early 1960-ies) and also in some other linguistic movements that were different in their methods, but similar in an attempt to include long complexes of sentences into the sphere of linguistic research. The functional grammar stressing the difference between theme and rheme, topic and comment (“given” and ‘new’ in a Czech variant of the theory) was moving towards building a bridge between the study of a discourse (on the background of which the distinction between these two main parts of an utterance is made) and each separate sentence (the link between the two aspects is clear also in a referential approach to pronouns and articles). In the study of clitics that became fashionable in the 1970-ies and 1980-ies structural features of an utterance became most prominent. While in the first draft of syntactical structure as attempted by Chomsky and his followers it was supposed that a sentence can be seen as consisting of a nominal phrase and a verbal phrase (SÞNP&VP), for many languages at least a tripartite scheme of an utterance has been proved to be valid. In Anatolian and many other ancient Indo-European dialects (such as the recently studied Old Novgorodian dialect of the birch-bark documents[14]) an utterance begins with a stressed word (often a conjunction) after which a long chain of grammatical enclitic elements follows (as shown in brilliant studies by Andrey Zalizhiak). They refer to the whole pragmatic and verb-actant scheme of the discourse and may have a scope broader than a sentence[15]. To describe such structures Zalizniak introduced a notion of a “barrier” after which a new chain of enclitics might reappear. The place of a barrier is determined by the pragmatic features of the discourse. The necessity to reconstruct Indo-European syntactic structure including such elements shows that the new point of view enters also a field of reconstruction that earlier belonged predominantly to the field of Saussurean research (see also below on the problem of the Indogermanische Dichtersprache). At the same time to study the order of enclitic elements in a chain one should develop a rank grammar that corresponds to the general principles of structural linguistics. On this example it is possible to see how the fusion of the two different points of view can be achieved.There are several trends of modern science that helped to elaborate the theory of utterance. Particularly rewarding became works on the theory of speech acts, theory of reference and pragmatic methods[16]. In the writings of the Tartu-Moscow School an attempt was made to overcome the line separating system and text (that was evident at least for semioticians following Bakhtin and Benveniste). In the works of the scholars belonging to this school literary and other verbal texts became main objects of their study. They attempted to overcome the border separating the study of language as a system and that of an utterance without constructing different disciplines that Bakhtin and Bartes had proposed.4.Monoglossia and Polyglossia. Bilingulism in the dialogical light. Monoglossia (absolute dominance of one language) typical of such an ancient city as Athens is opposed topolyglossia (coexistence of two languages, for instance of English and French in medieval England ). A spoken language in a modern society may seem to be more or less unified, but there are not only different social dialects (such as layers of New York English studied in the modern sociolinguistics), but also individual differences between speakers. A monological attitude is connected to monoglossia while a true dialogue is made possible through polyglossia. “Language is transformed from an absolute dogma it had been within the narrow framework of a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia into a working hypothesis for comprehending and expressing reality. But such a full and complete transformation can occur only under certain conditions, namely, under the condition of thoroughgoing polyglossia. Only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language”[17]. Synthesis of a synchronic and diachronic view of language (again different from an orthodox Saussurean position[18]) is necessary to discern polyglotic elements inside seeming monoglossia. Synchronically speaking a modern literary language might seem representing monoglossia. But its history reveals traces of polyglossia. Bakhtin says: « After all, one's own language is never a single language : in it there are always survivals of the past and of a potential for other- languagedness that is more or less sharply perceived by the working literary and language consciousness»[19].Recent research on the Greek dialects and on different layers of substrate words and later borrowings in Greek supports the general scheme suggested by Bakhtin: “Contemporary scholarship has accumulated a mass of facts that testify to the intense struggle that goes on between languages and within languages, a struggle that preceded the relatively stable condition of Greek as we know it. A significant number of Greek roots belonged to the language of the people who had settled the territory before the Greeks. In the Greek literary language we encounter behind each separate genre the consolidation of a particular dialect. Behind these gross facts a complex trial-at-arms is concealed, a struggle between languages and dialects, between hybridizations, purifications, shifts and renovations, the long and twisted path of struggle for the unity of a literary language and for the unity of its system of genres”[20].

Particularly interesting seems Bakhtinian explanation of the reasons for the success of Roman laughter (as in early comedies by Plautus): “ Roman literary concsiousness was bilingual. The purely national Latin genres, conceived under monoglotic conditions, fell into decay and did not achieve the level of literary expression. From start to finish, the creative literary concsiousness of Romans functioned against the background of the Greek language and Greek forms. From the very first steps, the Latin literary word viewed itself in the light of the Greek word, through the eyes of the Greek word, it was from the very beginning a word “with a sideways glance”, a stylized word enclosing itself, as it were, in its own piously stylized quotation marks”[21]. According to Bakhtin Latin area was characterized by “the interanimation” of at least three languages and cultures that intersected with one another- Greek, Oscan and Roman[22] to which probably one should add two more: Etruscan and Punic (a literary form of Carthaginian Phoenician as seen, for instance in the beginning of Plautus’ “Poenulus”).A specific stress on the importance of bilingualism and on the mixed character of every language was characteristic of Baudouin de Courtenay and his students and followers (such as Shcherba and Polivanov). The views of these scholars of the St.-Petesburgh linguistic school might have been known to Bakhtin since his formative University period. Similar points of view of Hugo Schuchardt (who had partly anticipated linguistic geography in its Romance part familiar to Bakhtin) influenced Leo Spitzer whose works Bakhtin read in early twenties. In respect to the role of spatial differentiation of dialects an approach different from a unitary monoglotic one was developed by Bartoli[23]. At the time when Bakhtin reformulated this linguistic position in a dialogical way and applied it to the theory of novel and its languages, comparable ideas lead to the introduction of the concept of a Sprachbund by Prince Nikolaj Troubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. Recent research on Creole and Pidgin languages continues the trend started by Baudouin and Schuchardt. A coming change is seen clearly in such a traditional field as Indo-European comparative grammar. To interpret its reconstructions the notions of Indo-European dialects and isoglosses between them (anticipated already at the second half of the XIXth century in the theory of waves of J. Schmidt) become more and more important: Troubetzkoy and later Vittore Pisani completely transformed the unitary concept of Proto-Indo-European to which Bakhtin referred in his critical remark cited above. In the reconstruction of  Indogermanische Dichtersprache it became possible to deal with utterances in different dialects (particularly in the Eastern Indo-European one to which Greek and Indo-Iranian might be traced back) belonging to a particular speech genres. But wider cultural implications of these notions still elude the majority of linguists working in a dogmatic way (as seen, for instance, in an interest in one unitary language viewed in a strictly synchronic monoglotic manner in most works on generative grammar).5.The Language of the City. Bakhtin was among those few scholars of the second quarter of the XXth century who had attempted to develop urban linguistics- a new field of linguistics that studies features of speech communications in the large cities. As also Larin who was the first to write a theoretical work on the subject [24] Bakhtin was continuing the pioneering work by Sainéan. For Bakhtin particularly important was a collection of materials presented by Sainéan in his study on the language of Rabelais[25]. Bakhtin reinterpreted these data (given by Sainéan as a neutral description[26]) from a point of view close that of sociolinguistics. To him characteristic features of Rabelais looked as belonging to the city market. He analyzed such genres as curses and “cries of  Paris ”. The latter represented a special type of advertising. Much later he same type of cries of tradesmen became an object of a special study of Peter G.Bogatyrev, the grest Russian folklore specialist who had been among the first to study ethnology in a structural functional way of the early Prague circle to the founders of which he had belonged. In a magnificent study of an Old Czech “Medieval Mock Mystery” completely parallel to the work of Bakhtin on carnival Roman Jakobson analyzed similar verbal devices of advertising found in the polyglotic texts of medieval Prague [27].Polyglossia was the main feature of most large cities throughout the history[28]. Describing linguistic situation at Samosata, Lucian’s native city, Bakhtin remarks: “The original inhabitants of Samosata were Syrians who spoke Aramaic. The entire literary and educated upper classes of the urban population spoke and wrote in Greek. The official language of the administration and and chancellery was Latin, all the administrators were Romans, and there was a Roman legion stationed in the city. A great thoroughfare passed through Samosata (strategically very important) along which flowed the languages of Mesopotamia , Persia and even India . Lucian’s cultural and linguistic consciousness was born and shaped at this point of the intersection of cultures and languages”[29]. This polyglot situation is seen as a dialogical prereqisite for creativity of a novelist.6.Heteroglossia. The word means simultaneous use of different kinds of speech or other signs, tension between them and their conflicting relationship inside one text. The term was coined (from the Greek stems meaning “other” and “speech”: etero- + gloss- +ia) by Bakhtin in his theoretical work on novel in 1934-1935 and became extraordinarily popular in linguistic, literary and anthropological works since 1980-s. In Bakhtin’s view, “at any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic), but also- and for us this is an essential point- into languages that are socio-ideological : languages of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘generic’ languages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of view, literary language is itself only one of these heteroglot languages- and it in its turn is stratified into languages (generic, period-bound, and others). And this stratification and heteroglossia, one realized, is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry

on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward”[30]. Bakhtin had in mind both the stylistic and social differences inside a language of any modern developed society and a writer’s intention to recreate them in prose, particularly in novel that could operate with different artistic images of languages and styles (Joyce’s “Ulysses” each chapter of which was written in a different linguistic style may serve an example). Heteroglossia is opposed to both monoglossia and polyglossia.Conflicting tendencies are hidden in a semantic potential of almost every word and they can be realized in everyday speech. But particularly pronounced such features are in the social contexts that make such ambivalence relevant for the whole society. This aspect of language in a totalitarian country was depicted in the image of Orwell’s  Newspeak. In a single utterance different speech attitudes may appear together. It was told that the Soviet Communist party leader Leonid Brezhnev used to say to his family at night: “It’s time for me to go to read Marx”. Without knowledge of the real situation a stranger might have heard in this sentence a genuine intention of a Marxist official to reread works of the founder of the whole movement in his spare time (comparable, for instance, to rereading of a Biblical text by a bishop). But actually Brezhnev had in mind his cynical hatred for this old-fashioned duty that had become a senseless ritual. To him Marx’s works that he barely knew were terribly dull and might cause one to get drowsy. Thus what he really meant was his wish to go to bed. Even if this joke was not real and belonged to the Soviet folklore of the period, it was quite symbolic as it showed the complete loss of the former communist creed in which Marx had acquired a role of a substitute for an apostle. A similar problem but in connection to a real religion (and not its fake substitute to which Soviet ideology deteriorated) has been discussed by Bakhtin in his study of Rabelais and the folk culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this work finished by 1945 Bakhtin (as later Le Goff[31]) has discovered linguistic and semiotic heteroglossia that was characteristic of the medieval European culture. It was characterized by a possible use of signs and words pertaining to the sphere of the official Church culture and of those which belonged to the unofficial folklore. The latter used parody of the official language as well as another set of symbols continuing the carnival tradition. As the rites with the inversion of the official symbols seem to be universal (according to anthropological works of Leach[32] and Turner[33]) semiotic heteroglossia that includes grotesque carnival images may belong to the most important features of almost all known societies. Heteroglossia (very often called by different terms having the same meaning) as a parallel or simultaneous use of different signs and images belonging to partly opposed or conflicting spheres may represent one of the common features of all cultures.In the particular case of medieval carnival as studied by Bakhtin heteroglossia may be seen at the purely linguistic level as well as on the higher level of signs encoded with verbal expressions. Thus in a medieval Old Czech mystery studied from a similar point of view by Roman Jakobson Latin songs coexist with grotesque jokes in Old Czech and remarks in Hebrew[34].7.Dialogical Theory of Speech Genres in Bakhtin’s last Works. In his last years Bakhtin was working on the general system of speech genres. The manuscript of a whole book that he had finished before leaving Saransk was lost (as Bakhtin told me when he lived in Podol’sk). But its contents may be reconstructed from what was published (Bakhtin 1990). Developing some ideas close to those of Spitzer Bakhtin tried to see which forms of verbal communication are used in a given society and are reflected (selected and/or transformed) in its literature. In one of his later polemical remarks concerning Saussurean opposition of langue vs. parole Bakhtin says: “Saussure ignores the fact that in addition to forms of language there are also forms of combinations of these forms, that is, he ignores speech genres”[35]. “Certain features of language (lexicological, semantic, syntactic) will knit together with the intentional aim, and with the overall accentual system inherent in one or another genre: oratorical, newspaper and journalistic genres, the genres of low literature (penny thrillers, for instance),or , finally, the various genres of high literature. Certain features of language take on the specific flavor of a given genre; they knit together with specific points of view, specific approaches, forms of thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of a given genre. In addition, there is interwoven with this generic stratification of language a professional stratification of language, in the broad sense of the term “professional”: the language of the lawyer, the doctor, the businessman, the politician, the public education teacher and so forth , and these sometimes coincide with, and sometimes depart from, the stratification into genres. It goes without saying that these languages differ from each other not only in their vocabularies, they involve specific forms for manifesting intentions, forms for making conceptualization and evaluation concrete. And even the very language of the writer (the poet or novelist) can be taken as a professional jargon on a par with professional jargons”[36].This main notion of Bakhtin’s later works has been developed by Anna Wierzbicka in her outstanding study on speech genres in the modern Polish society of the totalitarian period. According to her, the Polish system of speech genres included denunciation absent in such varieties of English as the Australian one (it does not seem that this distinction would be relevant for a comparison with some other systems inside the English-speaking communities).8.Direct-Indirect Speech and the Dialogical Principle. It seems that one of the main problems in Bakhtin’s studies is presented by interconnections between different parts of Bakhtin’s work. The link between the Spitzer-influenced study of the reported/indirect/ direct speech and the dialogical principle is a key question. Different forms of the direct, quasi-direct and indirect speech, reported speech and transposed discourse and pseudo-objective motivation as

studied by Lerch, Lorch and Spitzer were seen in much broader perspective: Bakhtin incorporated these discoveries into his general theory of the speech of the other person connecting it also to main problems of the poetics of novel.An extraordinarily interesting discovery that was made by Bakhtin was his finding of the possibility to connect the philosophical dialogical principle to the stylistic study of the speech of the other person. This field of research in Bakhtinian sense covered not only the sphere of the quasi-direct speech as studied by Spitzer (whose book is cited by Bakhtin), but also the formalist studies of narration (skaz) inaugurated by Eichenbaum at the time when the device became fashionable in the modern Russian prose (Bakhtin’s interest in this experiment may be seen from his lectures on the modern Russian authors). In his book on Dostoevsky Bakhtin suggested a whole system of labels meant to describe the different kinds of the Other’s speech that can be seen in a sort of a “periodic table” in which any new particular item should find its place. He studied the use of these metalinguistic devices in Dostoevsky’s writings.In an early work in disguise Bakhtin was particularly interested in the relation between the direct speech and the free indirect speech. In the latter using the transformation of the verbal tenses and persons it is possible to put the character’s actual utterances, preserving their word order, into the past tense as if they were parts of a narrative. In Voloshinov’s book in disguise (Voloshinov 1986) Bakhtin repeats a French example from Balzac analyzed by Lerch:Direct Speech: il protesta et s’écria: “Mon père te hait”ÞIndirect Speech: il protesta et s’écria que son père la haïssaitÞFree Indirect Speech : il protesta: “son père, s’écria-t-il, la haïssait”Among different forms of the speech of the other person analyzed by Spitzer Bakhtin became particularly interested in pseudo-objectivized sppech. Due to this device common truths are fprmulated in the atemporal present tense:Et c’est auprès de sa soeur, á sa sortie de l’hopital que Berthe vécut. Auprès de sa soeur, parce que les idées de famille sont plus fortes que toutes les autres idées at parce qu’une soeur sera notre soeur, qoui qu’il arrive “it was with her sister that Berthe lived when she came out of the hospital.With her sister because family values are stronger than any other, and because a sister will be our sister whatever happens”[37].As Bakhtin explains, the pseudo-objective motivation is characteristic of a certain type of novelistic style. It can be called a hidden word of the other[38].9.History od Direct and indirect Speech. Bakhtin remarks that “the representation of another’s word, another’s language in intonational quotation marks was known in the most ancient times, we encounter it in the earliest stages of verbal culture”[39]. In the oldest written traditions such ‘quotation marks’ usually render the direct speech. Let us compare data of the languages of the Ancient Near Est. In ancient Egyptian inscriptions of the  Old Kingdom quotations were introduced by the verbs of speaking dd (>Coptic čw[40]), wd (“to order”),dbh in constructions with embedding, cf. jnk mjw pw ‘3 nt(j) m jwnw dd(.w) r’w [p]w r z3=f hrw “’I am this great cat who is (ntj) in Heliopolis .’ This (pw) is what Re says (dd.w) to his son (r z3=f) Horus”[41]; in Sinuhe text: jnj wj ‘mmwnnšj hq3 pw h(j) (r0tnw-hrj.t dd=f n=j nfr tw hn=j sdm=k r3 n(j) km.t “Ammunenshi, the ruler of Upper Retjenu, took me (jnj wj) and said to me (dd=f n=j): ‘You will be happy (nfr tw”you are good”) with me , and you will hear (sdm-k) the language of Egypt”[42]; in the texts of Pyramids 1295a: wd.n jnpw hntj zh-ntr h3y=k m sb3 m ntr dw3(j) “Anubis, who presides over the god’s booth (zh-ntr) has ordered (wd.n) that you descend (h3y=k) as star (sb3), as the Morning Star (ntr dw3j “the morning god”)”[43].In Sumerian a particle of direct speech –e-še is supposed to be derived from the verbal root e-“to say”. As an example one of the oldest written specimens of a laughter fable belonging to the sphere of the Bakhtinian carnival imagery might be given: A.AB.BA TUN-bi kas-gu10–um-e –še “[The fox, having urinated into the Sea,] said:’The whole of the sea is my urine’”[44]. In Akkadian the particle of direct speech ‘um-ma precedes the words of the other person that may be marked also by the enclitical particle –mi. Hittite and Luwian use enclitic particles of direct speech –wa(r)-/ -wa-[45] (cf. also later Milyan or Lycian B we). They originated from a verb of speaking preserved in Palaic wer-ti «cries out» (about the Sun-god). In a Hurrian-Hittite bilingual text Hittite wa(r) translates Hurrian –an[46].In Sanskrit a very restricted use of indirect speech is limited by by such specific cases as indirect questions. In them there is a tendency to leave the reported speech unchanged, adding to it some markers of direct speech as iti [47].Bakhtin has analyzed later development of the indirect speech in Western European and Russian literature. His work influenced such studies as that of Vinogradov on «The Queen of Spades».10. Quotations. As a special linguistic device that is particularly interesting from Bakhtinian point of view one should study types of quotation. Bakhtin himself discussed the problem mainly on the example of the Mediaeval Latin texts. In Sanskrit there is a way to point to long quotations without repeating the whole text. In that case the latter is given only in the beginning of the discourse. In later occurrences only the first words are indicated, then itiady (<iti, marker of the direct speech+ ady) follows : ato 'ham (=aham) bravīmi anagatavatim cintām itiady «To this I'll say: 'The thoughts related to the future' etc.» («Hitopadesha»).For earlier stages of development the importance of direct speech in rendering quotations is not only documented by the most ancient written languages as those cited above. Recent ethnolinguistic work on the languages of the  South America has shown the extraordinary importance of such means of introducing quotations in direct speech as verbs of speaking. In Kuna the role of quotations was found particularly striking in the language of the chief medicine man Olowitinappi. As regards his talk, ' reported, quoted speech is a formal property of the text, which is literally

punctuated with soke (say) and takken soke (see he says). The repetition of these forms, at the end of lines, typical of the Kuna formal speech-making style»[48] may be illustrated by a following fragment:'Teki teukki nainukanki ina tiket' takken soke. 'nainu, tayleku pulalet pe niymartipa' soke.'pinsa pe tiko' soke. 'nekkwepurkatitte' soke “’well with regard to the fields planting medicine’ see he says. “If you, indeed have a communal farm’, he says. ‘You must plant for free’ see he says. ‘No money’ he says. ‘For it belongs to the village”, he says”[49]. In Bakhtinian terms we may speak of the monological use of quotations to render the authoritative opinion of a single person. The verb of speech follows each separate part of this monological discourse used by the speaker.In “Avesta’ the verb mru- “to speak” follows Ahura Mazda’s speeches in the frame of a pattern typologically close to this Kuna formal structure.Quotation to Bakhtin becomes an important criterion to distinguish different branches of knowledge: “ In the humanities- as distinct from the natural and mathematical sciences- there arises the specific task of establishing, transmitting and interpreting the words of others ( for example, the problem of sources in the methodology of the historical disciplines). And of course in the philological disciplines, the speaking person and his discourse is the fundemental object of investigation”[50]11.Semantics. Language and the World View. While discussing different languages contrasting each other in a heteroglotic text, Bakhtin often speaks about “language and world outlook”. To him they constituted a single notion. From this point of view Bakhtin might be compared to those scholars who continued Humboldt-influenced tradition of finding linguistic base for a mental model of the universe as Sapir, Whorf and Spitzer did. The latter seems again particularly close to Bakhtin as he studied verbal expression of ideas[51].While insisting on lack of semantic studies in contemporary linguistics, Bakhtin suggested an idea that contradicts recent semantic research constructing a system of lexical meanings or semantic features comparable to a phonemic or morphological pattern. According to Bakhtin, “the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions; it is from these that one must take the word, and make it one’s own”[52]. To Bakhtin semantics is concrete and social.Among particularly interesting discoveries made by Bakhtin in his semantic studies one may point out his conclusion about combination of praising and abuse in the language of the city market in Rabelais. This ambivalent semantics as well as the grotesque verbal imagery of the bottom of the body reminds of similar ideas of Freud studied in the first Bakhtin’s book in disguise. In a critical article on the place of language in Freud’s discovery Benveniste did not agree with this psychoanalytic concept. But at the same time when Bakhtin studied ambivalent meanings of Rabelaisian verbal abuse a similar discovery has been also made by a great Russian-Ossetian specialist in Iranian Abaev who was influenced by Marr’s semantic concepts. In his article on the topic Abaev finds linguistic correlation to Catullus line “Odi et amo…” or to similar passages in Dostoevskij. Words with magical connotation are usually ambivalent according to his study[53].To Bakhtin internal contradiction was connected to heteroglossia: “ It frequently happens that even one and the same word will belong simultaneously to two languages, two belief systems that intersect in a hybrid construction- and, consequently, the word has two contradictory meanings, two accents”[54].12.Parody of Language. The use of language in parody has been studied by Bakhtin particularly in connection to the process of setting the thinking free of language. A position of an observer who becomes absolutely independent of language is possible because of the role of parody. It is a prerequisite for a future novelistic word. It is based on the new apprehension of language as a thing to be described. A representative case of heteroglossia is found in an ironical use of speech forms, particularly in a parody. In several places in “Ulysses” Joyce suggests a parody of the new Irish drama: “ It’s what I am telling you, mister honey, it’s queer and sick we were, Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in”… ; in a chapter “Nausicaa” woman’s magazine style is taken over, in a chapter “Eumaeus” a parody of provincial journalese is introduced. In the other parts of the novel there is a grotesque mixture of several styles, as in a mockery of learned English in the speech of a ghost of Bloom’s grandfather.13.Names. Theoretical Problems of Onomastics. In his study of Rabelais’language Bakhtin comes to the conclusion that “his common and proper names are not differentiated”[55]. Most of the personal names have clear etymologies and thus can be understood as nicknames (in a brilliant Russian translation by Nikolay Liubimov some of them are rendered in Russian as nicknames : that would have been impossible for usual proper names). Some of traditional names that are not clear are explained by the artificial etymology, for instance,Gargantua from Grangousier’s exclamation Que grand tu as (le gousier) “What a big (gullet) you have!”. All such nicknamesbelong to one semantic sphere (that of words related to a gullet or a throat in our example). To prove it Bakhtin reverts also to scholarly etymologies of some names.On the example of the name Nemo in scholarly Latin Bakhtin discusses linguistic paradoxes that might seem parallel to famous logical paradoxes.In connection to Bakhtin’s interest in proper names a new approach to his publications in disguise might be suggested. His play with the last names of some of his friends and followers can be connected with the idea of linguistic games as studied later in Wittgenstein’s writings.

14.Linguistics and Poetics. In his early work Bakhtin distanced himself from an attempt to unify linguistics and poetics as it was suggested by scholars linked to the Formalist movement. Bakhtin insisted on the necessity to study language before linguistic results are used to understand stylistic devices.But at the same time Bakhtin agreed that a material of the art is not absolutely neutral. It has expressive side that is particularly important for the verbal art. “ And these expressive habits of using language (giving utterance to oneself and designating objects) are transposed by us into our apprehension of verbal art”[56]. Bakhtinian point of view was close to the studies of the expressive or affective language begun at the beginning of the century in the works of Bally, Vendryes, van Ginneken and Sapir (not to mention again the above mentioned school ofVossler and Spitzer). Later development of linguistics (particularly in generative grammar) went far away from these brilliant insights as a one-sided rationalist approach made investigation of the expressive side of language difficult if not impossible. Still there are such important exceptions as the last book of Roman Jakobson written in collaboration with Linda Waugh..15.Word in the Novel: the Core of Bakhtinian View of the Genre. To Bakhtin the Word (Slovo) was the central problem of his theory of the novel. The importance of the theory was determined by his particular attitude towards novel as the most important literary genre. The neglect of the novel to him was a proof of the internal deficiency of the formalists’ study of the prose. His literary studies step by step concentrated on the theory, prehistory and history of novel. By that time a true theory of novel was absent. Post-Hegelian and Marxist philosophical foundations were crucial for Lukacz’s classical books on the topic in which the novel was studied in connection to the history of consciousness. Later works by Lukacz (and some his followers such as L.Goldmann) were concentrated on the social background and the reasons for its transformation of decay (the idea had been anticipated in Osip Mandel’stam’s brilliant essay on the end of novel).Bakhtin’s theory of novel was in its essence a theory of Word in novel. The dialogical word is considered to be the main constructive element of the novel (as the symbol is for poetry). The word is described and represented by a word. The essence of a novel is its heteroglossy. This feature of a novel is reflected in the way how a writer characterizes each of the heroes. In a novel usually a main hero speaks in a way different from the rest of them. Each of heroes may have his or her own stylistic sphere or linguistic “zone”. As an interesting parallel to a literary reflection of the urban heteroglossia and polyglossia in Joyce’s novel one can see the structure of Velimir Khlebnikov’s “supertale’ (sverkhpovest’) “Zangezi” each part of which is written in a special language (of gods, of birds etc.).The following main types of compositional and stylistic units are distinguished by Bakhtin inside the novelistic whole:“1)Direct authorial literary-artistic narration…2) Stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration [skaz],3) Stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written) everyday narration (the letter, thediary, etc.);4)Various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda and so forth);5)The stylistically individualized speech of characters”[57].In Bakhtin’s studies of classical Russian and Western European novel each of these types has been investigated.A completely new approach was suggested in Bakhtin’s idea of an image of a language (for instance, in a parody). “The author encases his own thought in the image of another’s language without doing violence to the freedom of that language or to its own distinctive uniqueness” [58].16.Bakhtinian View of the History of Linguistics. Sacred Word and free Word.  According to Bakhtin linguistic consciousness “constituted itself outside …direct word”[59]. He supposed several main periods in the process of the development of this possibility. In the period the word is sacred. The first linguists were priests. This point of view may be corroborated by the recent research on Indogermanische Dichtersprache, particularly, Saussure’s notes on Indo-European priests being the first linguists (in this special field of study one may find complete coincidence of the ideas of Saussure and Bakhtin[60]). At this period the native language is studied on the background of a sacred one. The Old Indian grammar based on Sanskrit as an artificial (sams-krta) language may be given as an example. From the written languages of the Ancient Near East starting with the Ebla cuneiform archive (middle of the I I I mil. B.C.) one may cite a special mark of a heteroglotic word: the scribes who wrote documents in a sacred or official language used a so-called Glossenkeil ×× to point to a word borrowed from their own native speech (Luwian in the Hittite empire, Old Canaanite in Egypt of the time of El-Amarna).According to Bakhtin the next period was marked by a parody of a sacred word. “The Middle Ages produced a whole series of variants on the parodic-travestying Latin grammar. Case inflections, verbal forms and all grammatical categories in general were reinterpreted either in an indecent, erotic context, in a context of eating and drunkenness or in a context ridiculing church and monastic principles of hierarchy and subordination. Heading this unique grammatical tradition is the seventh-century work of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus. This is an extraordinarily learned work, stuffed with an incredible quantity of references, quotations from all possible authorities of the ancient world including some that had never existed; in a number of cases even the quotations themselves are parodic. Interwoven with serious and rather subtle grammatical analysis is a sharp parodic exaggeration of this very subtlety, and of the scrupulousness of scholarly analyses; there is a description, for example, of a scholarly discussion lasting two weeks on the question of the vocative case of ego, that is, the vocative case of “I.” Taken as a whole, Virgilius grammaticus’

work is a magnificent and subtle parody of the formalistic-grammatical thinking of late antiquity. It is grammatical Saturnalia,grammatica pileata. Characteristically, many medieval scholars apparently took this grammatical treatise completely seriously. And even contemporary scholars are far from unanimous in their evaluation of the character and degree of the parodic impulse in it”[61]. In this description (as also in all the other Bakhtin’s works on Medieval and Renaissance culture) one may see one feature that distinguishes it from the official academic literature on the subject. Bakhtin sincerely followed Rabelais poetic instruction in the motto to his novel (also translated also in Umberto Eco’s Il nome de la rosa as Il riso é proprio dell’uomo):Le rire est le propre de l’hommeBakhtin explains this new function of Latin word by its interplay with the native one: “another’s sacred word, uttered in a foreign language, re-evaluated and reinterpreted against the backdrop of these languages, and congeals to the point where it becomes a ridiculous image, the comic carnival mask of a narrow and joyless pedant, an unctious hypocritical old bigot, a stingy and dried-up miser. This manuscript tradition of “parodia sacra”, prodigious in scope and almost a thousand years long, is remarkable and as yet poorly read document testifying to an intense struggle and interanimation among languages, a struggle that occurred everywhere in Western Europe. It was a language drama played out if it were a gay farce”[62]. Bakhtin found that “in the linguistic satires of the Renaissance (The letters of Obscure People, the poetry of the macaronics0 three languages… animate one another: medieval Latin, the purified and rigorous Latin of the humanists and the national vulgar tongue”[63].At the last stage of development, “ language, no longer conceived as a sacrosant and solitery embodiment of meaning and truth, becomes merely one of many possible ways to hypothesize meaning”[64].Bakhtin has transformed the history of linguistics adding this new dimension to the history of human thought on language and verbal communication[65].

Homosexuality   is romantic and/or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same sex; "it also refers to an individual’s sense of personal and social identity based on those attractions, behaviors expressing them, and membership in a  community of others who share them."[1][2]

Homosexuality is one of the three main categories of sexual orientation, along with bisexuality and heterosexuality, within the heterosexual-homosexual continuum. The consensus of the behavioral and social sciences and the health and mental health professions is that homosexuality is a normal and positive variation in human sexual orientation,[3] though many religious societies, including Catholicism,[4] Mormonism,[5] and Islam,[6]and some psychological associations, such as NARTH, have traditionally taught that homosexual activity is sinful or dysfunctional.The most common adjectives in use are lesbian for women and gay for men, though gay can refer to either men or women. The number of people who identify as gay or lesbian—and the proportion of people who have same-sex sexual experiences—are difficult for researchers to estimate reliably for a variety of reasons. [7] In the modern West, according to major studies, 2% to 13% of the population are homosexual. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] A 2006 study suggested that 20% of the population anonymously reported some homosexual feelings, although relatively few participants in the study identified themselves as homosexual.[19] Homosexual behavior is also widely observed in animals.[20][21][22][23][24]

Many gay and lesbian people are in committed same-sex relationships. These relationships are equivalent to heterosexual relationships in essential psychological respects.[2] Homosexual relationships and acts have been admired, as well as condemned, throughout recorded history, depending on the form they took and the culture in which they occurred.[25] Since the end of the 19th century, there has been a movement towards increased visibility, recognition and legal rights for homosexual people, including the rights to marriage and civil unions, adoption and parenting, employment,military service, and equal access to health care.

Heterosexuality   is romantic and/or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the opposite sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, heterosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, physical or romantic attractions to persons of the opposite sex"; it also refers to "an individual’s sense of personal and social identity based on those attractions, behaviors expressing them, and membership in a community of others who share them".[1][2] The term is usually applied to human beings, but it is also observed in all mammals. Heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality together make up the heterosexual-homosexual continuum.

The term   gay  was originally used to refer to feelings of being "carefree", "happy", or "bright and showy"; it had also come to acquire some connotations of "immorality" as early as 1637.[1]

The term's use as a reference to homosexuality may date as early as the late 19th century, but its use gradually increased in the 20th century.[1] In modern English, gay has come to be used as an adjective, and occasionally as a noun, referring to the people, especially to men, and the practices and cultures associated with homosexuality. By the end of the 20th century, the word gay was recommended by major style guides to describe people attracted to members of the same sex.[2][3] At about the same time, a new, pejorative use became prevalent in some parts of the

world. In the Anglosphere, this connotation, among younger speakers, has a derisive meaning equivalent to rubbish or stupid (as in "That's so gay."). In this use, the word does not mean "homosexual", so it can be used, for example, to refer to an inanimate object or abstract concept of which one disapproves. This usage can also refer to weakness or unmanliness. When used in this way, the extent to which it still retains connotations of homosexuality has been debated.[4][5]

History

The word "gay" arrived in English during the 12th century from Old French gai, most likely deriving ultimately from a Germanic source.[1]For most of its life in English, the word's primary meaning was "joyful", "carefree", "bright and showy", and the word was very commonly used with this meaning in speech and literature. For example, the optimistic 1890s are still often referred to as the Gay Nineties. The title of the 1938 French ballet Gaîté Parisienne ("Parisian Gaiety"), which became the 1941 Warner Brothers movie, The Gay Parisian,[6] also illustrates this connotation. It was apparently not until the 20th century that the word began to be used to mean specifically "homosexual", although it had earlier acquired sexual connotations.[1]

The derived abstract noun gaiety remains largely free of sexual connotations, and has, in the past, been used in the names of places of entertainment; for example W.B. Yeats heard Oscar Wilde lecture at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin.[7]

SexualizationThe word had started to acquire associations of immorality by 1637[1] and was used in the late 17th century with the meaning "addicted to pleasures and dissipations."[8] This was by extension from the primary meaning of "carefree": implying "uninhibited by moral constraints." A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer and a gay house a brothel.[1]

The use of gay to mean "homosexual" was in origin merely an extension of the word's sexualised connotation of "carefree and uninhibited", which implied a willingness to disregard conventional or respectable sexual mores. Such usage is documented as early as the 1920s, and there is evidence for it before the 20th century, [1] although it was initially more commonly used to imply heterosexually unconstrained lifestyles, as in the once-common phrase "gay Lothario",[9] or in the title of the book and film The Gay Falcon (1941), which concerns a womanizing detective whose first name is "Gay." Well into the mid 20th century a middle-aged bachelor could be described as "gay", indicating that he was unattached and therefore free, without any implication of homosexuality. This usage could apply to women too. The British comic strip Jane was first published in the 1930s and described the adventures of Jane Gay. Far from implying homosexuality, it referred to her free-wheeling lifestyle with plenty of boyfriends (while also punning on Lady Jane Grey).A passage from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Miss Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable published use of the word to refer to a homosexual relationship. According to Linda Wagner-Martin (Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and her Family (1995)) the portrait, "featured the sly repetition of the word gay, used with sexual intent for one of the first times in linguistic history," and Edmund Wilson(1951, quoted by James Mellow in Charmed Circle (1974)) agreed.[10] 

Lesbian   is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females.[1] The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of femalehomosexuality, or as an adjective, to describe characteristics of an object or activity related to female same-sex desire.[2]

Lesbian as a concept, used to differentiate women with a shared sexual orientation, is a 20th-century construct. Throughout history, women have not had the freedom or independence to pursue homosexual relationships as men have, but neither have they met the harsh punishment in some societies as homosexual men. Instead, lesbian relationships have often been regarded as harmless and incomparable to heterosexual ones unless the participants attempted to assert privileges traditionally enjoyed by men. As a result, little in history has been documented to give an accurate description of how female homosexuality has been expressed. When early  sexologistsin the late 19th century began to categorize and describe homosexual behavior, hampered by a lack of knowledge about lesbianism or women's sexuality, they distinguished lesbians as women who did not adhere to female gender roles and designated them mentally ill.Women in homosexual relationships responded to this designation either by hiding their personal lives or accepting the label of outcast and creating a subculture and identity that developed in Europe and the United States. Following World War II, during a period of social repression when governments actively persecuted homosexuals, women developed networks to socialize with and educate each other. Greater economic and social freedom allowed women gradually to be able to determine how they could form relationships and families. With  second wave feminism and growth of scholarship in women's history and sexuality in the 20th century, the definition of lesbian broadened, sparking a debate about sexual desire as the major component to define what a lesbian is. Women generally exhibit greater sexual fluidity than men and find it easier to become physically and emotionally intimate with other women. Some women who engage in homosexual behavior may reject the lesbian identity entirely, refusing to identify themselves as lesbian or bisexual. Other women may adopt a lesbian identity for political reasons. Greater

understanding of women's sexuality has led to three components to identifying lesbians: sexual behavior, sexual desire, or sexual identity.Portrayals of lesbians in the media suggest that Western society at large has been simultaneously intrigued and threatened by women who challenge feminine gender roles, and fascinated and appalled with women who are romantically involved with other women. Women who adopt a lesbian identity share experiences that form an outlook similar to an ethnic identity: as homosexuals, they are unified by the discrimination and potential rejection they face from their families, friends, and others. As women, they face concerns separate from men. Lesbians may encounter distinct physical or mental health concerns. Political conditions and social attitudes also affect the formation of lesbian relationships and families.

Cultural   studies  is an academic field grounded in critical theory and Marxist literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its past historical precedents, conflicts, and issues. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural anthropology and ethnic studies in both objective and methodology. Researchers concentrate on how a particular medium or message relates to matters of ideology, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or gender.[1]

Cultural studies is extremely holistic, combining feminist theory, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Thus, cultural studies seeks to understand the ways in which meaning is generated, disseminated, and produced through various practices, beliefs, institutions, and political, economic, or social structures within a given culture.Contents1   History 2   Overview 3   Approaches 4   Contemporary cultural studies 5   Critical views 5.1   The Sokal Affair

6   Founding works 7   Universities with Programs in Cultural Studies or Related Programs 7.1   Australia

7.2   Canada

7.3   Caribbean

7.4   Hong Kong

7.5   Israel

7.6   Russia

7.7   Turkey

7.8   Taiwan

7.9   South Korea

7.10   United Kingdom

7.11   United States

[edit]History

The term was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS[citation needed]. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. Many cultural studies scholars employed Marxist methods of analysis, exploring the relationships between cultural forms (the superstructure) and that of the political economy (the base). By the 1970s, however, the politically formidable British working classes were in decline. Britain's manufacturing industries were fading and union rolls were shrinking. Yet, millions of working class Britons backed the rise of Margaret Thatcher. For Stuart Hall and other Marxist theorists, this shift in loyalty from the Labour Party to theConservative Party was antithetical to the interests of the working class and had to be explained in terms of cultural politics.In order to understand the changing political circumstances of class, politics, and culture in the United Kingdom, scholars at the CCCS turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian thinker of the 1920s and 30s. Gramsci had been concerned with similar issues: why would Italian laborers and peasants vote for fascists? Why, in other words, would working people vote to give more control to corporations, and see their own rights and freedoms abrogated? Gramsci modified classical Marxism in seeing culture as a key instrument of political and social control. In this view, capitalists use not only brute force (police, prisons, repression, military) to maintain control, but also penetrate the everyday culture of working people. Thus, the key rubric for Gramsci and for cultural studies is that of  cultural hegemony.Scott Lash writes,

In the work of Hall, Hebdige and McRobbie, popular culture came to the fore... What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture. If the fundamental Marxists saw power in terms of class versus class, then Gramsci gave to us a question of class alliance. The rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics.[2]

Write Edgar and Sedgwick:The theory of hegemony was of central importance to the development of British cultural studies [particularly the CCCS]. It facilitated analysis of the ways in which subordinate groups actively resist and respond to political and economic domination. The subordinate groups need not be seen merely as the passive dupes of the dominant class and its ideology.[3]

This line of thinking opened up fruitful work exploring agency, a theoretical outlook which reinserted the active, critical capacities of all people.[citation needed] Notions of agency have supplanted much scholarly emphasis on groups of people (e.g. the working class, primitives, colonized peoples, women) whose political consciousness and scope of action was generally limited to their position within certain economic and political structures. [citation needed][original research?] In other words, many economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians have traditionally deprived everyday people of a role in shaping their world or outlook, although anthropologists since the 1960s have foregrounded the power of agents to contest structure, first in the work of transactionalists like Fredrik Barth, and then in works inspired by resistance theory and post-colonial theory.[citation needed][original research?]

At times, cultural studies' romance with agency nearly excluded the possibility of oppression, overlooks the fact that the subaltern have their own politics, and romanticizes agency, overblowing its potentiality and pervasiveness. [citation

needed][original research?] In work of this kind, popular in the 1990s, many cultural studies scholars discovered in consumers ways of creatively using and subverting commodities and dominant ideologies.[citation needed] This orientation has come under fire for a variety of reasons.[citation needed]

Cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning and practices of everyday life. Cultural practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. In any given practice, people use various objects (such as iPods or crucifixes). Hence, this field studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Recently, as capitalism has spread throughout the world (a process associated with globalization), cultural studies has begun to analyse local and global forms of resistance to Western hegemony.[citation needed]

[edit]Overview

In his book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:

Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. For example, a study of a subculture (such as white working class youth in London) would consider the social practices of the youth as they relate to the dominant classes.

It has the objective of understanding culture in all its complex forms and of analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.

It is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action. For example, not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object, but she/he would connect this study to a larger, progressive political project.

It attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit cultural knowledge and objective (universal) forms of knowledge.

It has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action.[edit]Approaches

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field's inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies was developed in the 1950s and 1960s mainly under the influence first of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as 'capitalist' mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.In contrast, "cultural studies was grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition" in the United States (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002,p. 60).The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom. The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.In Canada, cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society, continuing the emphasis in the work of Marshall McLuhan and others. In Australia, there has sometimes been a special emphasis on cultural policy. In South Africa, human rights and Third World issues are among the topics treated. There were a number of exchanges between Birmingham and Italy, resulting in work on Italian leftism, and theories of postmodernism. On the other hand, there is a debate in Latin America about the relevance of cultural studies, with some researchers calling for

more action-oriented research. Cultural Studies is relatively undeveloped in France, where there is a stronger tradition of semiotics, as in the writings ofRoland Barthes. Also in Germany it is undeveloped, probably due to the continued influence of the Frankfurt School, which has developed a body of writing on such topics as mass culture, modern art and music.Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing  cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production (the economic base) essentially control a culture.Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view is best exemplified by the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva was an influential voice in the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.Ultimately, this perspective criticizes the traditional view assuming a passive consumer, particularly by underlining the different ways people read, receive, and interpret cultural texts. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively reject, or challenge the meaning of a product. These different approaches have shifted the focus away from the production of items. Instead, they argue that consumption plays an equally important role, since the way consumers consume a product gives meaning to an item. Some closely link the act of consuming with cultural identity. Stuart Hall and John Fiske have become influential in these developments.In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not only includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a cultural studies researcher not only includes traditional high culture (the culture ofruling social groups)[4] and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the discipline of comparative literature and cultural studies.[edit]Contemporary cultural studies

Sociologist Scott Lash has recently put forth the idea that cultural studies is entering a new phase. Arguing that the political and economic milieu has fundamentally altered from that of the 1970s, he writes, "I want to suggest that power now... is largely post-hegemonic... Hegemony was the concept that de facto crystallized cultural studies as a discipline. Hegemony means domination through consent as much as coercion. It has meant domination through ideology or discourse..."[5] He writes that the flow of power is becoming more internalized, that there has been "a shift in power from the hegemonic mode of 'power over' to an intensive notion of power from within (including domination from within) and power as a generative force."[6]Resistance to power, in other words, becomes complicated when power and domination are increasingly (re)produced within oneself, within subaltern groups, within exploited people.On the same subject, American feminist theorist and author of Gender Trouble Judith Butler wrote in the scholarly journal Diacritics an essay entitled "Further Reflections on the Conversions of Our Time", in which she described the shift in these terms:"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."In response, however, Richard Johnson argues that Lash appears to have misunderstood the most basic concept of the discipline.[7] 'Hegemony', even in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, is not understood as a mode of domination at all, but as a form of political leadership which involves a complex set of relationships between various groups and individuals and which always proceeds from the immanence of power to all social relations. This complex understanding has been taken much further in the work of Stuart Hall and that of political theoristErnesto Laclau, who has had some influence on Cultural Studies. It is therefore unclear as to why Lash claims that Cultural Studies has understood hegemony as a form of domination, or where the originality of his theory of power is actually thought to lie.Institutionally, the discipline has undergone major shifts. The Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, which was descended from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, closed in 2002, although by this time the intellectual centre of gravity of the discipline had long since shifted to other universities throughout the

world. Strong cultural studies programs can be found in the United Kingdom, North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, and there are a host of journals and conferences where cultural studies research is published and presented.[edit]Critical views

Cultural studies is not a unified theory but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches, methods, and academic perspectives; as in any academic discipline, cultural studies academics frequently debate among themselves. However, some academics from other fields have criticised the discipline as a whole. It has been popular to dismiss cultural studies as an academic fad. Yale literature professor Harold Bloom has been an outspoken critic of the cultural studies model of literary studies. Critics such as Bloom see cultural studies as it applies to literary scholarship as a vehicle of careerism by academics, instead promoting essentialist theories of culture, mobilising arguments that scholars should promote the public interest by studying what makes beautiful literary works beautiful.Bloom stated his position during the 3 September 2000 episode of C-SPAN's Booknotes:[T]here are two enemies of reading now in the world, not just in the English-speaking world. One [is] the lunatic destruction of literary studies...and its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and everyone knows what that phenomenon is. I mean, the...now-weary phrase 'political correctness' remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is, alas, still going on almost everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more than three-fifths of the tenured faculties in the English-speaking world, who really do represent a treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of the clerks'."[8]

Literary critic Terry Eagleton is not wholly opposed to cultural studies theory like Bloom, but has criticised certain aspects of it, highlighting what he sees as its strengths and weaknesses in books such as  After Theory (2003). For Eagleton, literary and cultural theory have the potential to say important things about the "fundamental questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized this potential.Whereas sociology was founded upon various historic works which purposefully set out to distinguish the subject as distinct from philosophy or psychology, cultural studies lacks any fundamental literature explicitly founding a new discipline. A relevant criticism comes from Pierre Bourdieu who, working in the sociological tradition, wrote on similar topics such as photography, art museums, and modern literature. Bourdieu's point is that cultural studies lacks scientific method.[9] His own work makes innovative use of statistics and in-depth interviews. Cultural studies is relatively unstructured as an academic field. It is difficult to hold researchers accountable for their claims because there is no agreement on method and validity.[edit]The Sokal AffairMain article: Sokal affairOne of the most prominent critiques of cultural studies came from physicist Alan Sokal, who submitted an article to a cultural-studies journal, Social Text. This article was what Sokal thought would be a parody of what he perceived to be the "fashionable nonsense" of postmodernists working in cultural studies. As the paper was coming out, Sokal published an article in a self-described "academic gossip" magazine Lingua Franca, revealing the hoax. His explanation for doing this was:Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a profound historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful -- not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent turn of many "progressive" or "leftist" academic humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social critique. Theorizing about "the social construction of reality" won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity.[10]

[edit]Founding works

Hall identifies some originating texts, or the original 'curriculum', of the field of cultural studies: Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy Raymond Williams' Culture and Society and The Long Revolution E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class [11]

Post-colonialism   ( postcolonial theory, post-colonial theory) is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy ofcolonialism. Postcolonialism comprises a set of theories found amongst anthropology, architecture, philosophy, film, political science, human geography, sociology, feminism, religious and theological studies, and literature.Contents1   Goals 2   Subject matters 3   Notable theorists

3.1   Edward Said

3.2   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

3.3   Frantz Fanon

4   International relations 5   The Middle East and national identity 6   Africa 7   Criticism of focusing on national identity 8   Founding works on postcolonialism 9   Other important works

[edit]Goals

The ultimate goal of post-colonialism is combating the residual effects of colonialism on cultures. It is not simply concerned with salvaging past worlds, but learning how the world can move beyond this period together, towards a place of mutual respect. This section surveys the thoughts of a number of post-colonialism's most prominent thinkers as to how to go about this.Post-colonialist thinkers recognize that many of the assumptions which underlie the "logic" of colonialism are still active forces today. Exposing and deconstructing the racist, imperialist nature of these assumptions will remove their power of persuasion and coercion. Recognizing that they are not simply airy substances but have widespread material consequences for the nature and scale of global inequality makes this project all the more urgent.A key goal of post-colonial theorists is clearing space for multiple voices. This is especially true of those voices that have been previously silenced by dominant ideologies - subalterns. It is widely recognized within the discourse that this space must first be cleared within academia. Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, provides a clear picture of the ways social scientists, specifically Orientalists, can disregard the views of those they actually study - preferring instead to rely on the intellectual superiority of themselves and their peers.To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought and culture, these were perceived either as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist, brought into reality by them, or as a kind of cultural and international proletariat useful for the Orientalist's grander interpretive activity. (Said, 1978: 208)Much debate has since taken place regarding how to effectively and fairly incorporate the subaltern voice into social studies. With such a huge mass of criticism against the idea of studying "others", many social scientists felt paralyzed, fatalistically accepting it as an impossibility. Spivak, an Indian post-colonialist thinker, rejects this outright. "To refuse to represent a cultural Other is salving your conscience, and allowing you not to do any homework."[1]

Spivak recognizes the project is problematic, as recovery and presentation of a subaltern voice would likely essentialize its message, negating the subaltern masses' heterogeneity. Spivak suggests "strategic essentialism" - speaking on behalf of a group while using a clear image of identity to fight opposition - is the only solution to this problem. Applying this approach, bell hooks addresses the white academic reader on behalf of subalterns in the conclusion to her paper "Marginality as a site of resistance".This is an intervention. A message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we meet in solidarity to erase the category colonized/colonizer. Marginality is the space [site] of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. Enter that space. We greet you as liberators. (hooks, 1990: 152)Some post-colonial theorists make the argument that studying both dominant knowledge sets and marginalized ones as binary opposites perpetuates their existence as homogenous entities. Homi K. Bhabha feels the post-colonial world should valorize spaces of mixing; spaces where truth and authenticity move aside for ambiguity. This space of hybridity, he argues, offers the most profound challenge to colonialism. (Bhabha, 1994: 113) Critiques that Bhabha ignores Spivak's stated usefulness of essentialism have been put forward. Reference is made to essentialisms' potential usefulness. An organized voice provides a more powerful challenge to dominant knowledge - whether in academia or active protests.Fanon offers a less bright and more violent prescription for moving beyond the colonial mindset. He argues that previously colonized peoples would remain hybrids with a miserably schizophrenic identity unless they revolt violently against their oppressors. This collective action would apparently stimulate collective pride, freeing them of their inferiority complexes.[2]

Ultimately, however, Post-colonialism is a hopeful discourse. The very "post" defines the discipline as one that looks forward to a world that has truly moved beyond all that colonialism entails, together. Mbembe finds it gives him "hope in the advent of a universal brotherly [and I would add sisterly] community". [3] Asking what it means to be human together, post-colonialism aims at decolonizing the future.[edit]Subject matters

"The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination."— Che Guevara, speech to the United Nations, December 11, 1964 [4]

The critical nature of postcolonial theory entails destabilizing Western ways of thinking, therefore creating space for the subaltern, or marginalized groups, to speak and produce alternatives to dominant discourse. Often, the term

postcolonialism is taken literally, to mean the period of time after colonialism. This however is problematic because the ‘once-colonized world’ is full of “contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and liminalities”.[5] In other words, it is important to accept the plural nature of the word postcolonialism, as it does not simply refer to the period after the colonial era. By some definitions, postcolonialism can also be seen as a continuation of colonialism, albeit through different or new relationships concerning power and the control/production of knowledge.[5][6] Due to these similarities, it is debated whether to hyphenate postcolonialism as to symbolize that we have fully moved beyond colonialism.[7]

Postcolonialism as a literary theory (with a critical approach), deals with literature produced in countries that once were colonies of other countries, especially of the European colonial powers Britain, France, and Spain; in some contexts, it includes countries still in colonial arrangements. It also deals with literature written by citizens of colonial countries that portrays colonized people as its subject matter. In Dutch literature a specific colonial and post colonial segment is named Indies (after Dutch East Indies) literature. A sub-segment specifically focuses on post colonial identity formation and culture of the diasporic Indo-Europeans, a (Eurasian) community originally from Indonesia. Its main author was Tjalie Robinson.[8]Colonized people, especially of the British Empire, attended British universities and with their access to education, created this new criticism. Following the breakup of the Soviet Unionduring the late 20th century, its former republics became the subject of this study as well.[9]

Often, previously colonized places are homogenized in western discourse under an umbrella label such as the ‘ Third World’. Postcolonialism demonstrates the heterogeneity of colonized places by analyzing the uneven impact of Western colonialism on different places, peoples, and cultures.[10] This is done by engaging with the variety of ways in which “relations, practices and representations” of the past is “reproduced or transformed”, and studying the connections between the “heart and margins” of the empire. [10] Moreover, postcolonialism recognizes that there was, and still is, resistance to the West. This resistance is practiced by many, including the  subaltern, a group of marginalized, and least powerful.Postcolonial theory provides a framework that destabilizes dominant discourses in the West, challenges “inherent assumptions”, and critiques the “material and discursive legacies of colonialism”. [5] In order to challenge these assumptions and legacies of colonialism, postcolonial studies needs to be grounded, which entails working with tangible identities, connections, and processes. Postcolonial theorist Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism has been described as a seminal work in the field.[11]

Furthermore, Postcolonialism deals with cultural identity in colonized societies: the dilemmas of developing a  national identity after colonial rule; the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate that identity (often reclaiming it from and maintaining strong connections with the colonizer); the ways in which the knowledge of the colonized (subordinated) people has been generated and used to serve the colonizer's interests; and the ways in which the colonizer's literature has justified colonialism via images of the colonised as a perpetually inferior people, society and culture. These inward struggles of identity, history, and future possibilities often occur in the metropolis and, ironically, with the aid of postcolonial structures of power, such as universities. Not surprisingly, many contemporary postcolonial writers reside in London, Paris, New York and Madrid.The creation of binary opposition structures changed the way we view others. In the case of colonialism, the Oriental and the Westerner were distinguished as different from each other (i.e. the emotional, static, Orient vs. the principled, progressive Occident). This opposition justified the "white man's burden," the coloniser's self-perceived "destiny to rule" subordinate peoples. In contrast, post-colonialism seeks out areas of hybridity and transculturalization. This aspect is particularly relevant during processes of globalization.In Post-Colonial Drama: theory, practice, politics, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins write: "the term postcolonialism – according to a too-rigid etymology – is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state, Not a naïve teleological sequence which supersedes colonialism, postcolonialism is, rather, an engagement with and contestation of colonialism's discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies ... A theory of postcolonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism."[12]

Colonized peoples reply to the colonial legacy by writing back to the center, when the indigenous peoples write their own histories and legacies using the coloniser's language (e.g. English, French, Dutch) for their own purposes.[13] "Indigenous decolonization" is the intellectual impact of postcolonialist theory upon communities of indigenous peoples, thereby, their generating postcolonial literature.A single, definitive definition of postcolonial theory is controversial; writers have strongly criticised it as a concept embedded in identity politics. Ann Laura Stoler, in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, argues that the simplistic oppositional binary concept of Coloniser and Colonised is more complicated than it seems, since these categories are fluid and shifting; postcolonial works emphasise the re-analysis of categories assumed to be natural and immutable.Postcolonial Theory - as epistemology, ethics, and politics - addresses matters of identity, gender, race, racism and ethnicity with the challenges of developing a post-colonial national identity, of how a colonised people's knowledge was used against them in service of the coloniser's interests, and of how knowledge about the world is generated under specific relations between the powerful and the powerless, circulated repetitively and finally legitimated in service to

certain imperial interests. At the same time, postcolonial theory encourages thought about the colonised's creative resistance to the coloniser and how that resistance complicates and gives texture to European imperial colonial projects, which utilised a range of strategies, including anti-conquest narratives, to legitimise their dominance.Postcolonial writers object to the colonised's depiction as hollow "mimics" of Europeans or as passive recipients of power. Consequent to Foucauldian argument, postcolonial scholars, i.e. the Subaltern Studies collective, argue that anti-colonial resistance accompanies every deployment of power.[edit]Notable theorists

[edit]Edward SaidSaid took the term Orientalism, which was used in the West neutrally to describe the study and artistic depiction of the Orient, and subverted it to mean a constructed binary division of the world into the Orient and the  Occident.[14] This binary, also referred to as the East/West binary, is key in postcolonial theory. Said argued that the Occident could not exist without the Orient, and vice versa. In other words, they are mutually constitutive. Notably, the concept of the ‘East’ i.e. the Orient, was created by the ‘West’, suppressing the ability of the ‘Orient’ to express themselves. Western depictions of the ‘Orient’ construct an inferior world, a place of backwardness, irrationality, and wildness. This allowed the ‘West’ to identify themselves as the opposite of these characteristics; as a superior world that was progressive, rational, and civil.Furthermore, Said, following Foucalt's belief, states that power and knowledge are inseparable. The ‘West’s’ claim to knowledge of the East gave the ‘West’ the power to name, and the power to control. [6] This concept is essential to understanding of colonialism, and therefore recognizing postcolonialism.Some postcolonial writers have critiqued Said's homogeneous binary of Occident and Orient insisting that multiple variations of Orientalism have been created within the western world and are at work. Said believes that Europe used Orientalism as a homogeneous "other" to form a more cohesive European identity.[15]

[edit]Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakSpivak's main contribution to Postcolonial theory came with her specific definition of the term subaltern. Spivak also introduced terms such as 'essentialism', 'strategic essentialism'. [10]The former term refers to the dangers of reviving subaltern voices in ways that might simplify heterogeneous groups, creating stereotyped impressions of their diverse group. Spivak however believes that essentialism can sometimes be used strategically by these groups to make it easier for the subaltern to be heard and understood when a clear identity can be created and accepted by the majority. It is important to distinguish that 'strategic essentialism' does not sacrifice its diversity and voices but that they are being downplayed temporarily to support the essential element of the group.Spivak also created the term 'epistemic violence' which refers to the destruction of non-western ways of knowing and thereby the domination of western ways of understanding. This concept relates to Spivak's "Subaltern must always be caught in translation, never truly expressing herself" because of the destruction and marginalization of her way of understanding.[10]

Furthermore, Spivak criticizes those who ignore the "cultural others" (the subaltern) and has offered constructive theories for allowing the West to go beyond its current position through self-criticism of western methods and ideals of understanding and exploring the alternatives offered by post-colonialism.[10][16]

[edit]Frantz FanonFanon is one of the earliest writers associated with postcolonialism. In his book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon analyzed the nature of colonialism and those subjugated by it. He describes colonialism as a source of violence rather than reacting violently against resistors which had been the common view. [17] His portrayal of the systematic relationship between colonialism and its attempts to deny "all attributes of humanity" to those it suppressed laid the groundwork for related critiques of colonial and postcolonial systems.[18]

[edit]International relations [edit]The Middle East and national identity

In the last decade, Middle Eastern studies and research produced works focusing upon the colonial past's effects on the internal and external political, social, cultural, and economic circumstances of contemporary Middle Eastern countries; cf. Raphael Israeli's "Is Jordan Palestine?" [19] A particular focus of study is the matter of Western discourses about the Middle East, and the existence or the lack of national identity formation:[20]

“... [M]ost countries of the Middle East, suffered from the fundamental problems over their national identity. More than three-quarters of a century after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, from which most of them emerged, these states have been unable to define, project, and maintain a national identity that is both inclusive and representative”.[21]

Independence and the end of colonialism have not ended social fragmentation and war in the Middle East. [22][citation

needed] Larbi Sadiki wrote in The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (2004), because European colonial powers drew borders discounting peoples, ancient tribal boundaries and local history, the Middle East’s contemporary national identity problem can be traced back to imperialism and colonialism.Kumaraswamy writes that "in places like Iraq and Jordan, leaders of the new state were brought in from the outside, [and] tailored to suit colonial interests and commitments. Likewise, most states in the Persian Gulf were handed over to those who could protect and safeguard imperial interests in the post-withdrawal phase",[23]

According to Sadiki, "with notable exceptions like Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, most [countries] ... had to [re-]invent, their historical roots" after colonialism. Therefore, "like its colonial predecessor, postcolonial identity owes its existence to force".[24]

[edit]Africa

The interior of Africa was not colonised until almost the end of the 19th century, yet the impact of colonialism was even more significant to the indigenous cultures, especially because of the Scramble for Africa. The increasingly efficient railway helped European powers to gain control over all regions of Africa, with the British particularly emphasizing goals of conquest. The British Empire sought to build a single railway through the continent and succeeded in building tracks from Egypt to Cape Town.Many African empires existed in the pre-colonial era, such as the Empires of Ashanti and Benin, and the Kingdoms of Dahomey and Kongo. Nigeria was home to the Haussa, Yorubaand Igbo cultures and Chinua Achebe was among the first to take up this history in the construction of a postcolonial identity, as in Things Fall Apart.Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o was educated at the British University of Leeds and wrote the first postcolonial East African novel, Weep Not, Child, in 1964. The later The River Betweenaddresses postcolonial religious issues. His essay Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature is considered one of the most important pieces of African literary criticism.[edit]Criticism of focusing on national identity

Scholars criticise and question the recent post-colonial focus on national identity. The Moroccan scholar Bin 'Abd al-'Ali argues that what is seen in contemporary Middle Eastern studies is 'a pathological obsession with ... identity'.[25] Nevertheless, Kumaraswamy and Sadiki argue that the problem of the lack of Middle Eastern identity formation is widespread, and that identity is an important aspect of understanding the politics of the contemporary Middle East. Whether the countries are Islamic regimes, republican regimes, quasi-liberal monarchies, democracies, or evolving democracies, ‘the Middle Eastern region suffers from the inability to recognize, integrate, and reflect its ethno-cultural diversity.’[26]

Ayubi (2001) questions if what Bin 'Abd al-'Ali described as an obsession with national identity may be explained by 'the absence of a championing social class?'[27]

[edit]Founding works on postcolonialism

Aimé Césaire : Discourse on Colonialism (1950) Frantz Fanon : Black Skin, White Masks (1952) Frantz Fanon : The Wretched of the Earth (1961) Albert Memmi : The Colonizer and the Colonized (1965) Kwame Nkrumah : Consciencism (1970) Edward Said : Orientalism (1978)

What and Where is Post-colonial Theory?The inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence with the MetropolitanPolice’s admission of institutionalised racism, the defamatory and near racistlanguage used by both sides of the political divide over the issue of asylumseekers and refugees, and the appalling and terrifying spectre of extreme rightwing domestic terrorism are just some of the news stories of the last few yearswhich have thrown into sharp relief the debates which surround issues such asracism, nationalism, national identity, immigration, the continuing legacies ofwestern colonial, imperial histories and the nature of society in multi-culturalurban areas.Much of the most exciting, challenging and thought-provoking work in the fieldsof visual arts and literature has been focused on precisely such issues, be it fromestablished and successful artists such as Chris Opili, Yinke Shonebare, andZadie Smith, to less well known artists such as John Nassari, Ming Wong andothers featured in this site.In Arts and Humanities Departments in Universities throughout the world suchissues and concerns have been theorised, discussed, debated and disseminatedunder the category of Post-colonial Theory. This site aims to provide a resourcefor students, artists, writers and researchers interested in finding out more aboutthis exciting but difficult area of cultural and critical theory. It aims to introducesome of the key arguments and issues and will feature some of the most important figures in the field, whilst at the same time acknowledging that, in attempting to be accessible some of the ideas may have been somewhat skimmed. Given the wide and developing scope of this theory some key figures who have made important contributions to post-colonial theory have unfortunately been omitted. However, what is lost through this introduction is made up for in the extensive reading lists and links; the site is primarily designed to function as a research tool to enable a groundwork into the thoughts, ideas, conceptual under-pinnings and lively debates which make up the field of postcolonial theory. Before beginning this introductory guide to post-colonial theory, it is important to place the term into some historical and intellectual contexts. As the term implies, one of the central features of post-colonial theory is an examination of the impact and continuing legacy of the European conquest, colonisation and domination of non-European lands, peoples and cultures. In short, the creation by European powers such as England and France of dominated foreign empires. Central to this critical examination is an analysis of the inherent ideas of European superiority over non-European peoples and cultures that such imperial colonisation implies. In addition to critically analysing the assumptions that the colonisers have of the colonised, this

work also seeks to uncover the damaging effects of such ideas on both the self-identity of the colonised and the instability of the conceptual underpinnings of the colonisers. A key feature of such critical theoretical examinations is the analysis of the role played by representation in installing and perpetuatingsuch notions of European superiority. To put it simply, how does representation perpetuate negative stereotypes of non-European people and cultures and how do such stereotypes negatively affect the identity of those stereotyped? Furthermore, given the decolonisation of these lands following the Second World War and the development of independent nation states, what is the role of representation in the construction of new postcolonial identities? Given the centrality of concepts of representation, identity and history to the project of post-colonial theory, it will be of no surprise to find many of the key thinkers in the field have been influenced by the post 1960’s intellectual movements of structuralism and post-structuralism. Influential thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristera have all had their conceptual and theoretical ideas used, sometimes in slightly modified or developed form, in the work of contemporary post-colonial theorists.

Three post-structuralist thinkers stand out as being largely influential in the field, these being Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida - Lacan, Foucault and Derrida are, in different ways, important to the work of the four key post-colonial theorists. These are Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, and Homi. K. Bhabha.

Fanon Franz Fanon (1925-61) was born in Martinique in the French Antilles in 1925. He was educated in Martinique and in France and in 1943 he joined the Free French Forces in Dominica before being posted to Morocco. His anti racist sensibilities were sharpened by his wartime experiences as black Free French soldiers were treated as subordinate to their white counterparts and experienced racism on a daily basis. After the war, Fanon continued his studies at Lyons Medical School where he took a course in psychiatric medicine as well as studying philosophy and editing a number of political magazines. After furthering his studies in psychiatry, he was appointed head of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria in 1953. In 1954 he resigned to join the Algerian rebels, the FLN, fighting an armed struggle for independence from French colonial rule. This led to his expulsion from Algeria and a lifetime of critical, theoretical and practical work fighting against colonialism and racism. As Deborah Wyrick usefully points out in her excellent introductory study, Fanon for Beginners, his work can be divided into three sections. These being; the search for black identity, the struggle against colonialism, and the process of decolonisation.2 Fanon’s work on black identity was formed through his experiences in psychiatry and is deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. This stage of Fanon’s work is best illustrated by hispowerful book Black Skin, White Masks. This work can be seen as a pioneeringexample of psychoanalytical theory being used as a critical tool in political theoretical writing. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon suggests that colonialism, with its explicit conceptual under-pinnings of white racial superiority over non-white peoples, has created a sense of division and alienation in the self-identity of the non-white colonised peoples. The history, culture, language, customs and beliefs of the white colonisers are, under colonialism, to be considered as universal, normativeand superior to the local indigenous culture of the colonised. This creates a strong sense of inferiority in the colonised subject and leads to an adoption of the language, culture and customs of the colonisers by the colonised as a way ofcompensating for these feelings of inferiority in their self-identity. This creates a divided sense of self in the subject formation of the colonised. This adoption of the culture and beliefs of the colonisers leads to a sense of alienation from their own culture by the colonised. Fanon also suggests that the adoption of the language and forms of representation of the colonisers has further negative effects on the indigenous subject in that representational stereotypes are constructed which tend to infantilize, primitivise, decivilize, and essentialise them.3 Fanon’s work on the role of representation in the construction of self-identity clearly shows the influence of the theories of Lacan, in particular his concept of the mirror-stage of identity formation. Here Lacanoutlines a theory of identity formation in reference to the image of completeness in the body of another person outside of the self. This occurs in early childhood and begins a process of identification with images in the construction of the self which continues throughout adult life.4 ‘As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try, then to find value for what is bad - since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the colour of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution, to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.’5 The second stage of Fanon’s critical activity is the struggle against colonialism, which grew out of his active nvolvement in the Algerian war of independence and his membership of the FLN. This can be found in his works Dying Colonialism and Toward the African Revolution. Given the revolutionary nature of these writings and the context in which they were written it will be unsurprising to find that they are deeply influenced by Marx and the discourses of Western Marxism

6 including the work of the Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser. The complex discussion in regard to importance of Marxist thinking to the project of post-colonial theory would entail a large digression and unfortunately will not be manifested here.7Fanon’s important contribution to the struggle against colonialism is his concern with history. For Fanon, the work of the struggle against colonialism involves the ‘claiming back’ of their own history by the colonised from the negative or nonexistent versions of it produced by the colonisers. He stresses the vital importance of the culture and representations of their past being central to the creation of both new positive forms of subject formation and new forms of social organisation which are necessary in the newly independent post-colonial era. This emphasis on the creation or rediscovery of new forms of history or the understanding of history in the plural shows some affinity with the work of Michel Foucault, albeit from a position inspired by a Marxist concept of the dialectic rather than Foucault’s non-dialectical post-structuralist analysis. Much of this work can be found in Fanon’s most famous and widely read work, The Wretched of the Earth. Published in 1961, with a preface by one of his intellectual influences,Jean-Paul Sartre, Wretched of the Earth is a passionate and revolutionary work of political critique and is a cornerstone of post-colonial theory. ‘colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptyingthe native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures and destroys it… . … .To fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for the liberation of the nation, that material keystone which makes the building of a culture possible.’8 The process of decolonisation relates to the third stage of Fanon’s critical activity. Along with the reclamation and reconstruction of their own history and culture as the basis for the new post-colonial forms of nation and national identity, Fanon also discusses two further ideas which are of vital interest to later post-colonial work. These are concepts of ‘colonial space’ and ideas surrounding the role of the middle-class intelligentsia in these new nations. Both of these ideas stem from Fanon’s understanding that it is important for postcolonial nations to develop new forms of social democracy rather then utilise existing colonial institutions and simply fill existing administrative positions with indigenous people. Using the example of city planning and urbanism, Fanon suggests that these colonial institutions are inherently racist, as they reproduce and construct the concepts and ideas of the colonisers. For example, most colonial cities contain areas where the colonial administrators and business people live and work. These are zones of privilege which largely exclude indigenous people and as such, they construct and reproduce the ideologies of the colonisers. Fanon argues for the radical rebuilding of these urban areas and all other forms of colonial administration and government in ways which will construct more democratic, post-colonial forms of social organisation, to thoroughly reject the ideologies which underpin colonial rule. He also argues that the education sections of the colonised population must be aware that their education is based on the ideologies and beliefs of thecolonisers and although they are indigenous people, they must take care not to reproduce the concepts and beliefs of the colonisers in the period of postcolonial rebuilding.Many of Fanon’s insights have been developed by a new generation of critics and theorists who have taken his ideas as inspiration but moreover have extended their scope through the application of further contemporary forms of post-structuralist analysis, whilst retaining Fanon’s radical spirit.

Edward SaidOne such figure is the Palestinian-American academic and writer Edward Said(1935 -____).Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said was educated in Egypt and in America. He hastaught in a number of prestigious American universities, including Stamford,John Hopkins and Columbia, where he is currently Professor of English. Inaddition to his academic work, he also writes regularly in the national press onissues concerning the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and MiddleEastern political affairs.In 1978, he published his most famous work Orientalism, a ground-breakinganalysis of the stereotypes and colonial assumptions that are inherent in westernrepresentations of the ‘Orient’. The ‘Orient’ for Said being North African Araband Middle-Eastern peoples and cultures. In orientalism, he argues that theOrient has been represented as the binary opposite of the West or occident. Inmany respects, the Orient as discussed by Said, is everything about the Westwhich it finds uncomfortable or unsettling to its superior image and which itprojects onto its negative conceptualisation of the Middle-East. Here, the Orientis seen as the occident’s other.Said argues that ‘orientalism’ is a western fantasy of the Middle-East which isbased on this ‘otherness’ and which is institutionalised through westernrepresentations in all media, although as an English Professor he concentrateshis analysis on examples drawn from late Nineteenth and early Twentieth

Century literature and academic texts. Said discusses how these orientalistrepresentations function to reimpose colonial domination through suggesting thatwestern values, beliefs and forms of culture are imposed to counter theinherently negative ‘traits’ of these so called inferior cultures. ‘Orientalism’ isalso found by Said to be operating on two levels in representation. These aredrawn from Freud, the manifest and the latent or to put it in everyday language,the explicit and stated and the implicit and unstated.In his excellent introductory study Beginning Post-Colonisation, John McLeoddiscussed the negative representations or stereotypes outlined by Said in hisanalysis. The Middle-East is represented in ‘orientalist’ representations in thefollowing negative ways. The ‘Orient’ is ‘timeless`, that is without a concept ofhistory until given one by the West. The ‘Orient’ is ‘strange` that is odd, bizarreand weirdly irrational in contrast to the ‘rational normality’ of the West.The Orient is ‘feminine`, that is possessive and submissive in opposition to theWest’s ‘masculine’ features of activity and domination. The Orient is‘degenerate`, or lazy, weak, lustful and peopled by criminals and shady immoralcharacters. In short, the East is everything morally negative in comparison to theWest’s moral superiority.9 Said also argues that orientalist forms ofrepresentation constructs crude racial and sexual stereotypes. For example, theArab male is represented as being inherently lazy and murderously violent, whilethe Arab female is promiscuous, immodest and sexual licentious.In developing his analysis of western representations of the East, Said drawsheavily on the work of French post-structuralist theorist Michel Foucault.‘I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, asdescribed by him in ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’ and in ‘Discipline andPunish’, toidentify orientalism’.10 Discourse can, in simple terms, be conceived of as a‘framework of thought’ which occurs when dispersed utterances or ‘statements’begin to coagulate into more concrete conceptual frames. Foucault’sarchaeological historical method is to uncover the conditions which make such‘coagulations’ possible and then to analyse the rules of formation which meanthese dispersed statements can be conceived of as a discourse. The rules offormation which turn these statements into discourses are, that, firstly, theyshould have a common object of analysis. This common object of analysis inSaid’s work is the Orient. The second feature which helps in the formation ofdiscourse is that there is a common mode of speaking which unites all thesestatements. Here the common mode of speaking will be the speech of thecolonisers and their assumptions of western superiority. The third rule whichgoverns the formation of discourse, is that these statements employ a coherentsystem of concepts. The coherent system of concepts employed by the West intheir representations of the East are its theoretical and conceptual principlessuch as liberal humanism and capitalism and their enlightenment-basedphilosophical under-pinnings based on scientific rationality. The last ofFoucault’s rules of formation of discourse is that the statements have aconsistent theme which unites them. Here, the themes are the above-mentionednotions of the Middle-East as being timeless, feminine and degenerate as well asthe consistent theme of the West’s moral and cultural superiority.Dangers and negative effects of the emergence of discourse on the productionand dissemination of knowledge or speech prevents certain knowledge frombeing produced and places limits and exclusions around who can speak and onwhat subject. Discourse also produces ‘truths’ which is where a statement orconcept is deemed to be truth rather than being actually or empirically true.Discourse also forces the speaker into a subject position in relation to it, whichundermines traditional notions of human ageing in the production of ideas andbeliefs.11

Whilst on the subject of post-structuralist theorists and their application to postcolonial theory, it is worth briefly mentioning the work of Jacques Derrida.Derrida is associated with the critical philosophised practice of ‘Deconstruction`.Deconstruction aims to unmask and unpick the conceptual binary oppositionswhich make up the structure of Western thought. For example, man/woman,western/eastern, mind/body, public/private ..... the list could go on. Derridasuggests that these binary oppositions are hierarchically structured with oneterm being privileged over the other. Moreover, he also suggests that each termis defined by its opposite and thus these conceptual oppositions are unstable.Much post-colonial theory, from Fanon onwards also questions such hierarchicalbinary oppositions which maintain colonialism and colonial concepts.13The above discussion of the work of Franz Fanon and Edward Said illustratesthe theoretical and multi-disciplinary nature of the project of post-colonial theory.Drawing on theoretical and philosophical insights from areas of research such aspsychoanalysis, cultural studies, feminism, marxism and the aforementionedpost-structuralist theories of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and others mean thatcurrent post-colonial theory can be an difficult area of study; it is important toreiterate the relationship between post-colonial theory and the complex theoriesaround notions of post-modernism which are currently being debated in theuniversity.Additionally, the work of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak and Homi Bhabha and theirimportant ideas in areas where post-modernism, feminism, contemporaryadvanced cultural theory, philosophy and post-colonial theory overlap is worthexploring. Much of this advanced work is published in post-colonial theoryreaders and compilations of extracts from key texts, many of which contain usefulcontextualising introductory essays.It will be clear that two of the central concerns of postcolonial theory are identityand representation. Much current work in the field draws on post structuralisminsights into the role of representation in the construction of identity and theinstabilities that this process entails. The three areas of current concern in postcolonial theory which venture into this territory and open it up to fruitful analyticdebate are notions of Hybridity, Ethnicity and cultural Location. These are not,of course, unrelated nor are they the only areas of post colonial critical analysisbut by concluded with a brief discussion of these areas some light may be thrownonto these debates and the work in visual culture which relates to them. Keytexts in the debates surrounding Hybridity, Ethnicity and Location can be foundin The Post Colonial Studies Reader, Eds. Tiffin, Ashcroft and Griffiths, whichalso contains very useful contextualising introductory paragraphs on theseareas.HybridityAs we have already seen, one of the earlier stages of postcolonial analysisinvolved the reclamation of pre-colonial forms of history and culture and theconstruction of new national identities based on specific and local knowledgesand histories. In many respects this process of identity formation through theconstruction of myths 14 “of nation and national identity refers to the humanistCartesian notion that self identity is a forced and stable category based on aknowable, “transcendental” and “autonomous” sense of self 15, closer analysishowever, reveals that patterns of migration, both the movement of colonisers intothe colonised area and immigration from the “colonies” to the “colonial power”,result in national identity being much more hybrid than was originally understood.“That the need to assert such myths of origin was an important feature of earlypost colonial theory and writing and that it was a vital part of the collectivepolitical resistance which focused on issues of separate identity and culturaldistinctiveness is made clear [… .] But what is also made clear is how problematicsuch construction is and how it has come under question in more recent

accounts… [… ] ”Hybridity occurs in post colonial societies both as a result of consciousmovements of cultural suppression, as when the colonial power invades toconsolidate political and economic control, or when settler-invaders disposesindigenous peoples and force them to “assimilate” to new social patterns. It mayalso occur in later periods when patterns of immigration from metropolitansocieties and from other imperial areas of influence [… .] continue to producecomplex cultural palimpsests with the post colonial world”.16An example of the hybrid nature of national identity may be found in recentpopular culture with the chart hit football song, Vindaloo by Fat Les, whereEnglish national identity is constructed in and through the cultural representationof football and the consumption of Indian food.EthnicityClosely related to the notion that post colonial national identities are of a hybridnature is the body of work which surrounds concepts of Ethnicity. Thedevelopment of the term ethnicity in current post colonial theory marks a shiftfrom earlier discussions of “race “ and some brief analysis of the two termsshould help throw some light onto current debates in this area.Earlier struggles against racism and colonialism centred upon the construction ofthe positive identity of being “black” and as such this concept of “blackness” wasprimarily based on physical features and characteristics as a marker of identity.Useful as this may have been to the political struggles against racism andcolonialism, it tended to homogenise and universalise the experience of all blackpeople and to deny that there are a multitude of diverse cultures within the“black” community. Furthermore this approach tended to “privilege” black peopleas being the only victims of racism and colonialism. For these reasons, the termEthnicity rather than race came into use in postcolonial analysis. Ethnicityrecognises the social, cultural and religious practices which help to constitute acultural identity and is less reductive than the more physically based concept ofrace. Furthermore, this shift towards “Ethnicity” as a focus for critical activity andanalysis recognises and to some extent foregrounds the aforementionedconcepts of Hybridity and cultural identity.LocationThe above mentioned concepts of the hybridity of cultural identity and theanalysis identity in terms of ethnicity rather than race, leads to a more complexunderstanding of cultural location. Space does not permit a detailed discussionof current thinking in this area except to say that location is less concerned withanalysis of a particular geographical area and its relationships to identity butrather with the analysis of the social, cultural, religious and linguistic processeswhich constitute a cultural identity regardless of the specific location in whichthese occur. This concern with the non-geographic aspects of cultural locationresults in a more sophisticated analysis of political struggles against racism andcolonialism and takes into account both the migrations of diaspora communitiesand their interaction with other social groups, be they indigenous peoples orother cultural diasporas.The concepts of Hybridity, Ethnicity and Location are just three areas ofpostcolonial theory which emphasize the heterogeneity of postcolonial culturalidentity and its constructed and unstable nature. This has led to a more complexand sophisticated analysis of the politics of identity as it relates to the conditionof life in a postmodern, postcolonial world.The purpose of this piece is to map the terrain of the debates rather than take aposition within them. It is worth, however, grappling with the theory discussedabove, as the insights that much of it contains can be usefully applied to theanalysis of our electronic based, image centred, consumer culture and much ofthis work has provided useful critiques of such concepts as history, identity, theself or subject and representation and consequence that characterise the shifttowards the condition of post-coloniality.This essay contains many useful links to other websites exploring the ideasexpressed above. In addition, it is worth searching the Links section of this site

as many other relevant websites and projects are referenced there

Neo-Marxism is a loose term for various twentieth-century approaches that amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, usually by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions, such as:  critical theory, psychoanalysis or Existentialism (in the case of Sartre).Erik Olin Wright's theory of contradictory class locations, which incorporates Weberian sociology and critical criminology, which incorporates anarchism, is an example of the syncretism in neo-Marxist theory. [1] As with many uses of the prefix neo-, many theorists and groups designated as neo-Marxist have attempted to supplement the perceived deficiencies of orthodox Marxism or dialectical materialism. Many prominent neo-Marxists, such as Herbert Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School, were sociologists and psychologists.Neo-Marxism comes under the broader framework of the New Left. Neo-Marxism is also used frequently to describe opposition to inequalities experienced by Lesser Developed Countriesin a globalized world.In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to Marxist philosophy. Strains of neo-Marxism include:critical theory, analytical Marxism and French structural Marxism.The concept arose as a way to explain questions which were not explained in Karl Marx's works. There are many different "branches" of Neo-Marxism often not in agreement with each other and their theories.

Contents [hide]1   History 2   See also 3   References 4   External links

[edit]History

The development of Neo-Marxism came forth through several political and social problems which traditional Marxist thought was unable to answer. Examples to this were: Why socialist and social-democratic political parties did not band together against WWI, but instead supported their own nations entrance into the Great War. Why although the timing seemed to be right for a workers revolution in the west, no large scale revolutions occurred. Also how at this time the rise of Fascism could occur in Europe. All these questions led to internal problems within Marxist theory which caused renewed study and reanalysis of Marx's works to begin.There is no formal Neo-Marxist organization and seldom do people call themselves Neo-Marxists, so it is difficult to describe who belongs to this movement. Also there is no set definition as to what a Neo-Marxist is, which makes grouping and categorizing this idea even more difficult.One idea that many "branches" of Neo-Marxism share is the desire to move away from the idea of a bloody revolution to one of a more peaceful nature. Moving away from the violence of the red revolutions of the past while keeping the revolutionary message. Neo-Marxist concepts can also follow an economic theory that attempts to move away from the traditional accusations of class warfare and create new economic theory models, such as Hans Jurgen Krahl did.Several important advances to Neo-Marxism came after World War I from Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci. From the Institute of Social Research founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt am Main, grew one of the most important school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, The Frankfurt School. Its founders Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno whose critical theories had great influence on Marxist theory especially after their exile to New York after the rise of National Socialism in 1933.

SHYAMSUNDAR KULAKARNI.B.E KUVEMPU UNIVERSITY JNANA SHYADRI SHANKARAGHATTA