Among Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ideological spectrum, from old-fashioned humanist to structuralist to postmodernist. In this candid assessment of his place in Russian and Western thought, Caryl Emerson brings to light what might be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader: Bakhtin's foundational ideas, forged in the early revolutionary years, yet hardly altered in his lifetime. With the collapse of the Soviet system, a truer sense of Bakhtin's contribution may now be judged in the...
Among Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ide...
Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concerns Small wonder, then, that...
Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin...
The essays in "Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges" extend Bakhtin's concepts in important new directions and challenge Bakhtin's own use of his most cherished ideas. Four sets of paired essays explore the theory of parody, the relation of de Man's poetics to Bakhtin's dialogics, Bakhtin's approach to Tolstoy and ideological literature generally, and the dangers of dialogue, not only in practice but also as an ideal.
The essays in "Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges" extend Bakhtin's concepts in important new directions and challenge Bakhtin's own use of...
Late Imperial Russia's revolution in literacy touched nearly every aspect of daily life and culture, from social mobility and national identity to the sensibilities and projects of the country's greatest writers. Within a few decades, a ragtag assembly of semi-educated authors, publishers and distributors supplanted an oral tradition of songs and folktales with a language of popular imagination suitable for millions of new readers of common origins eager for entertainment and information. This title tells the story of this profound transformation of culture, custom and belief.
Late Imperial Russia's revolution in literacy touched nearly every aspect of daily life and culture, from social mobility and national identity to the...
The tale of Boris Godunov--tsar, usurper, tsarecide--dating from the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles, inspired three major nineteenth-century Russian cultural expressions: in history by Nikolai Karamzin, in drama by Alexander Pushkin, and in opera by Modest Musorgsky. Each of these famous creations was a vehicle for generic innovation, in which a specifically Russian concept of genre was asserted in opposition to the reigning European models: German historiography, French melodrama, and Italian opera. Within a Bakhtinian framework, Caryl Emerson explores these three versions of...
The tale of Boris Godunov--tsar, usurper, tsarecide--dating from the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles, inspired three major nineteenth-ce...
This collection of theatre writings by the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky brings his powerful, wildly imaginative vision of theatre to an English-language audience for the first time. The centerpiece is his play That Third Guy (1937), a farce written at the onset of the Stalinist Terror and never performed.
This collection of theatre writings by the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky brings his powerful, wildly imaginative vision of theatre to an ...
