The Notion of “Context” in Mikhail Bakhin and His Circle

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is epistemological. We aim at analyzing the notion of context in theories by Bakhtin, Medviédev and Volóchinov. In order to demonstrate the present relevance of such purpose, we start by commenting on recent theorizations about context, developed in François Rastier’s interpretative semantics and in Teun van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis (CDA). The notion of context was discussed in Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophical works, in Bakhtin, Medviédev and Volóchinov’s sociological method, as well as in Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and metalinguistics. In all these stages, the findings pointed to the centrality and complexity of the notion of context in the theory of language elaborated in the Bakhtin Circle texts, which present three main dimensions: the ethical-valuative context, the extraverbal context and the verbal context.