12/23/2023 0 Comments Polyphonic novels![]() Medvedev's "Formal Method" is clearly inspired by him though his exact share in the text seems to me debatable. He is now considered to be the author of Valentin Voloshinov's "Marxism and the Philosophy of Language" (1928). As early as 1924 Bakhtin rejected the approach of the Russian formalists as "material aesthetics," 2 and in Pavel Medvedev's "Formal Method in Literary Scholarship" (1928), of which Bakhtin is supposed to be the author or at least the dominant co-author, we find a sharp criticism of the early Formalists from a point of view which is outwardly Marxist but actually phenomenological in its rejection of the mechanistic presuppositions of the early Formalists.īakhtin has, mainly since his death, acquired a great reputation as a literary theorist and early semiotician. It would be a mistake to call these questions simply formalist. It deliberately focuses on a few questions: the role of the hero in Dostoevsky's novels, the way ideas are presented in the novels, the question of the genre tradition to which Dostoevsky was indebted or is supposed to belong and finally the special use of language and dialogue in the novels. Bakhtin's book has nothing to say about the biography of Dostoevsky, and very little about the ideological content of his works or of its setting in time and place. It comes to grips with a central task of criticism: it asks what is peculiar to Dostoevsky's art, how and why it differs from that of other novelists. Mikhail Bakhtin's "Problems of Dostoevsky's Creation" (1929), renamed "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics" in the second, considerably revised and enlarged edition in 1963 1 is rightly considered one of the most stimulating and original books of the enormous literature on Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky Studies :: BAKHTIN’S VIEW OF DOSTOEVSKY: “POLYPHONY” AND “CARNIVALESQUEīAKHTIN’S VIEW OF DOSTOEVSKY: “POLYPHONY” AND “CARNIVALESQUE Renй Wellek, Princeton University
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