The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov (Hodder Arnold Publication)
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0340592672
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This anthology provides a comprehensive selection of the writing by Bakhtin and of that attributed to Voloshinov and Medvedev. It introduces readers to the aspects most relevant to literary and cultural studies and gives a focused sense of Bakhtin's central ideas and the underlying cohesiveness of his thinking.
somebody else. This tack of the intonational movement patently makes an opening in the situation for a third participant. Who is this third participant? Who is the recipient of the reproach? The snow? Nature? Fate, perhaps? Of course, in our simplified example of a behavioral utterance the third participant - the 'hero' of this verbal production - has not yet assumed full and definitive shape; the intonation has demarcated a definite place for the hero but his semantic equivalent has not been
language and not within the structure of an utterance, appears devoid of value judgment. Focusing their attention on the abstract system of language is what led most linguists to divorce evaluation from meaning and to consider evaluation an accessory factor of meaning, the expression of a speaker's individual attitude toward the subject matter of his discourse Referential meaning is molded by evaluation; it is evaluation, after all, which determines that a particular referential meaning may enter
offer me that unified bodily image of myself as a 'gift'. Similarly, only another consciousness can offer me a unified sense of my personality. This aesthetic production of a unified perception of bodily and personal being is characterized by Bakhtin as a loving gift mutually exchanged between self and other across the borderzone of their two consciousness. T h e principles of giving a form to the soul are the principles of giving a form to inner life from outside, from another consciousness; the
other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication. Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word 'response' here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account. After all, as regards a given question, in a given matter, and so forth, the utterance occupies a
to serve directly opposing aims. Discourse becomes an arena of battle between two voices. In parody, therefore, there cannot be that fusion of voices possible in stylization or in the narration of a narrator (as in Turgenev, for example); the voices are not only isolated from one another, separated by a distance, but are also hostilely opposed. Thus in parody the deliberate palpability of the other's discourse must be particularly sharp and clearly marked. Likewise, the author's intentions must