Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. seventies and eighties. What characterized the industry in its earliest stages was its exegetical task. Writers often stumbled upon Bakhtin and his various writings, and sought to explain and relate their contents (see Morson, Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work; Shukman; Holquist, "The Politics of Representation"; Booth). They found the task difficult because, as so many have noted, there seem to be so many diverse strains, so many far-flung topics, and so many different analytical tools. Moreover, there's the problem of the "disputed texts," those books or articles which list Voloshinov and Medvedev as author but which have been attributed at least in part to Bakhtin himself.None of this is news. But what often goes unnoticed is that most (if not all) of this writing about Bakhtin in some sense tries to "unify" his work under a single rubric. Bialostosky and (from a different angle) Todorov give us the "dialogic" Bakhtin; Morson and Emerson have lately given us the "prosaic" Bakhtin; Shepherd, Hirschkop, and White have given us the "marxist" Bakhtin; and Clark and Holquist have given us what is probably the most popular version, the "architectonic" Bakhtin. Even those works which treat the most subtle complexities-like Morson and Emerson's, in which "prosaics" is comprised of Bakhtin's many different attempts to understand the polyglot social dimension of language; or Clark and Holquist's, in which architectonics relates the literary and the social as a human event-ultimately subsume most of Bakhtin's thinking under a totalizing term, even if the subsumption takes the guise of "dialogizing" the body of Bakhtin/Voloshinov/Medvedev's work.Michael Bernard-Donals is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he teaches rhetorical and critical theory. His book on Bakhtin and contemporary critical theory will be published next fall by Cambridge UP; he has written articles on Bakhtin, critical theory, popular culture, and the teaching of writing. All of the people I have mentioned so far-and others-have a great deal of difficulty in reconciling the various Bakhtins as one writer or one set of ideas.Something is always left out (like Holquist's finessing the problems of authorship) or glossed over (as in White's preliminary remarks on the hegemonic discourse of the novel). In this paper I want to suggest that one of the reasons why these "unifying" visions of Bakhtin will inevitably fail is because there are two dominant and distinct-though by no means mutually exclusive-strains that run through Bakhtin's work; that these strains account for some of the vastly different concerns in that work; and that, because Bakhtin was never fully able to...

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