Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) has become a name to conjure
with. We know this because he is now one of those thinkers everyone
already knows-without necessarily having to read much of him! Doesn't
everyone now know how polyphony functions, what carnival means, why
language is dialogic but the novel more so, how chronotopes make
possible any concrete artistic cognition and that utterances give rise
to genres that last thousands of years, always the same but not the
same? Like Marx and Freud in the twentieth century, or Plotinus and
Plato in the fourth, a familiarity with Bakhtin's thinking is so
commonly assumed, at least in the Humanities, as to be taken for
granted. He is no longer an author but a field of study in his own
right. As Craig Brandist (of the Bakhtin Centre at Sheffield University)
reports: the works of the [Bakhtin] Circle are still appearing in
Russian and English, and are already large in number...There are now
several thousand works about the Bakhtin Circle.The freedom given to
contributors to address any text or topic under the general rubric of
The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative has produced a remarkable
variety of essays ranging widely over different periods, genres, and
cultures. While most of the contributors chose to explore Bakhtin's
theory of genre or to take issue with his account of one genre, Greek
romance, the remaining contributions defy such convenient categories.
What all the essays share with one another (and those collected in
Bakhtin and the Classics) is the attempt to engage Bakhtin as a reader
and thinker.
