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Major Concepts of Bakhtin
Providers:
Ally Chang / 張雅麗 ; Sandy Kao;
Kate Liu / 劉紀雯
- dialogism (vs.
monologism)
- words as utterances
with plural meanings (reflections and refractions) ;
- every word presupposes
an interlocutor;
- "the relation
between the utterance and other utterances"
 An Outline by Ally Chang on
"Discourse in the Novel"
(Stam 14). relations between the text and its others
in the forms of
-- argument -- polemics and parody;
--overtones, pauses and implied attitude;
-- "confidence in another's word";
-- the relation between languages, literatures, genres, styles and
even entire cultures. . .
- heteroglossia,
carnevalesque (vs. the language of the church), polyphony An Outline by Sandy Kao
- carnival: An Outline by Sandy Kao;
"Laughter and
the Carnivalesque"
- Carnival [literal
meaning] --can be traced back to the Dionysian festivites of the
Greaks and the Saturnalia of the Romans; enjoyed its apogee of
both observance and symbolic meaning in the High Middle Ages..
- Much more than the
mere cessation of productive labor, carnival represented am alternative cosmovision characterized by the ludic undermining of all norms.
(Stam 86)
- The carnivalesque
principle abolishes hierarchies, levels social classes, and creates
another life free from conventional rules and restrictions.
(Stam 86)
- finds its emblem
in the grotesque, pleasure-seeking human body: fat and fleshy,
eating, drinking, fornicating and defecating to excess. ( e.g.
Rabelais' Gangatua)
- some major concepts:
(Stam 93-94)
- the valorization
of Eros and life force;
- the notion of
bisexuality and the practice of transvestitism as a release
from the burden of socially imposed sex roles;
- a corporeal semiotic
celebrating the grotesque, excessive body and the 'orifices'
of the lower bodily stratum;
- the topos of carnival
as "gay relativity" and Janus-face ambiguity and ambivalence.
- a perspective
on language that valorizes the obscene, the nonsensical, and
'marketplace speech' as expressive of the linguistic creativity
of common people;
- the view of carnival
as participatory spectacle, a 'pageant without footlights'
which erases the boundaries between spectator and performer.
- the epic and the novel
- chronotope, time/space
"particular combinations of time and space as they have resulted in
historically manifested narrative forms (Holquist 109) An Outline by Sandy Kao
II. Bakhtin and his Circle of Relations:
A. Bakhtin, Freudianism
(e.g. Freudianism: a Marxist Critique [1927]; )
Bakhtin on Freud--to
historicize, politicize and socialize Freud:
- Bakhtin salutes Freud's
emphasis on language, but critiques the model of language adopted.
The Freudian model . . . fails to see that every exchange
of words, including that between the analyst and patient, is "ideological,"
characterized by specific social intonations through which it gains
historical specificity and momentum (Stam 4).
- recast the Unconscious/Conscious
distinction as one not between two orders of psychic reality but rather
between two modalities of verbal consciousness. [Official Consciousness
and unofficial consciousness--that which deviates from social norms.]
- Bakhtin vs. Lacan (Stam 4-5): shares with Lacan a preoccupation
with the image of the mirror and the role of the other in our psychic
life.
- Even the apparently
simple act of looking at ourselves in the mirror, for Bakhtin,
is complexly dialogical, implying an intricate intersection of
perspectives and consciousness. To look at ourselves in
the mirror is to oversee the reflection of our life in the plane
of consciousness of others; it is to see and apprehend ourselves
through the imagined eyes of our parents. . .
- Not limited to a "stage"
of psychic development;
- The Lacanian intervention
makes subjectivity dependent upon the recognition of an irreducible
distance separating self from other, and in so doing, turns psychic
life into a series of irremediable losses and misrecognitions.
But while Lacan seems to see human beings as eternally susceptible
to the lure, as ontologically defined by lack and imperfection,
as subject to a desire that can only lead to an impasse of dissatisfaction,
Bakhtin foregrounds the human capacity to mutually "author" one
another, the ability to dialogically intersect on the frontiers
between selves.
B. Bakhtin & Russian
Formalism (P.N. Medvedev and M.M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in
Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics)(Stam 34-37)
- deconstructs a number
of crucial formalist dichotomies:
- intrinsic/extrinsic:
For Bakhtin, "In the process of history. . . things extrinsic and
intrinsic dialectically change places; what was once 'within' can
easily become 'without,' and vice versa.
- practical/poetic language:
the two types of languages interpenetrate each other;
- material/device, and story/plot.
C. Bakhtin & Saussure & Marxism (Marxism and
the Philosophy of Language by V.N. Volosinov)
- Saussure-- focuses on
'synchrony" and the sign system
- Bakhtin -- turns his
attention to the diachronic;
- "sees verbal language
as forming part of a continuum of semioses, a plurality of sign-related
discourses that share a common underlying logic and can be "translated"
into one another.
- "Translinguistics"
(vs. semiology): "a theory of the role of signs in human life
and thought" (Stam31); formulated in Russia in the early decades
of 20th (Stam 30-31);
- Both consciousness
and ideology are semiotic, whether in the form of "inner speech"
or in the process of verbal interaction with others, or in mediated
forms like writing and art.
D. Bakhtin's influence on
Kristeva's intertextuality
Kristeva: "Word,
Dialogue and Novel" Desire in Language p. 65-66
intertextuality
To investigate the status
of the word is to study its articulations (as semic complex) with
other words in the sentence, and then to look for the same functions
or relationships at the articulatory level of larger sequences. …
3 dimensions of texutal
space: writing subject, addressee, and exterior texts. The word's
status is thus defined horizontally (the word in the text belongs
to both writing subject and addressee) as well as vertically
(the word in the text is oriented toward anterior or synchronic literary
corpus. –two axes
…each word (text) is an
intersection of word (texts) where at least one other word (text)
can be read. …any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any
text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of
intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic
language is read as at least double.
Reference:
- Holquist, Michael. Dialogism:
Bakhtin and His World. New York: Routledge, 1990.
- Stam, Robert.
Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
(external)
Literary
Criticism Databank: Structuralism and Semiotics
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