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Guide to key terms in literary theory - designed to make difficult terms, concepts and theorists accessible and understandable.
Michael Holquist's masterly study draws on all of Bakhtin's known writings, providing a comprehensive account of his achievement. This edition includes a new introduction, concluding chapter and a fully updated bibliography.
These essays extend an ongoing conversation on dialogic qualities of poetry by positing various foundations, practices, and purposes of poetic dialogism. The authors enrich and diversify the theoretical discourse on dialogic poetry and connect it to fertile critical fields like ethnic studies, translation studies, and ethics and literature.
These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)—known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky—as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology. Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.
This study portrays how Louise Erdrich’s writing extends Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and the novel through an investigation of a selection of her works, as well as her practices of writing, co-writing, re-writing, and reading novels. Erdrich’s hallmark dialogic literary style and practice encompasses writing a series of books; re-cycling protagonists, narrators, events, themes and settings; re-writing previously published novels; employing heteroglossia and polyglossia; co-authoring texts, blogging about books; translating different epistemologies for different audiences; and spotlighting families as the main thematic concern in dialogue with her own parenting experiences as depict...
Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic assembles thirteen essays on the intersection of Bakhtin's narrative theory, especially his concept of dialogism. The book explores the dimensions of using Bakhtin for a feminist analysis and discerns the connections between feminist dialogics and cultural materialism. The authors offer various views ranging from studies of ecofeminism, gender theories of novelistic discourse, Bakhtin and French feminism, to analyses of contemporary novelists such as Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, and Pat Barker. Drawing on Bakhtin's sociolinguistics, this book provides an introduction to feminist work on Bakhtin and the development of a cultural politics of reading. Challenging questions are raised: What is dialogic feminism? Can Bakhtin's theories advance a feminist politics? How does a feminist dialogics fit into a materialist feminist practice? Can the "dialogic imagination" also describe some of the most radical moments within feminist thinking? The interdisciplinary focus of these responses represents the ongoing dialogue among literary critics, cultural theorists, and feminists.
‘Bakhtin and his Others’ aims to develop an understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas through a contextual approach, particularly with a focus on Bakhtin studies from the 1990s onward. The volume offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin’s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality – including his concepts of chronotope and literary polyphony – by reconsidering his ideas in relation to the sources he employs, and taking into account later research on similar topics. The case studies show how Bakhtin's ideas, when seen in light of this approach, can be constructively employed in contemporary literary research.
The last half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of literary theory as a new discipline. As with any body of scholarship, various schools of thought exist, and sometimes conflict, within it. I.R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to the field. Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years. Some 170 scholars from around the world have contributed their expertise to this volume. Their work is organized into three parts. In Part I, forty evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools of and appro...
Major figures in contemporary anthropology present a dialogic critique of ethnography. Moving beyond sociolinguistics and performance theory, and inspired by Bakhtin and by their own field experiences, the contributors revise notions of where culture actually resides. This pioneering effort integrates a concern for linguistic processes with interpretive approaches to culture. Culture and ethnography are located in social interaction. The collection contains dialogues that trace the entire course of ethnographic interpretation, from field research to publication. The authors explore an anthropology that actively acknowledges the dialogical nature of its own production. Chapters strike a balance between theory and practice and will also be of interest in cultural studies, literary criticism, linguistics, and philosophy. CONTRIBUTORS: Deborah Tannen, John Attinasi, Paul Friedrich, Billie Jean Isbell, Allan F. Burns, Jane H. Hill, Ruth Behar, Jean DeBernardi, R. P. McDermott, Henry Tylbor, Alton L. Becker, Bruce Mannheim, Dennis Tedlock