The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedvev, Voloshinov

by Pam Morris

This anthology provides a comprehensive selection of the writing by Bakhtin and of that attributed to Voloshinov and Medvedev. It introduces readers to the aspects most relevant to literary and cultural studies and gives a focused sense of Bakhtin's central ideas and the underlying cohesiveness of his thinking.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Linguistics, Lit Crit, Language, Literature

224 pages, Hardcover

First published July 24, 1994

Reviews

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An anthology done well can take a series of disparate ideas produced by a particular thinker and arrange these ideas so that they build on each other by creating a kind of cohesion that emphasizes the relationships across numerous texts. Pam Morris has created one of these anthologies. While Bakhtin can be difficult to read when he writes about utterances and linguistics, the ideas he promotes in these texts are fascinating. I am most encaptured by what he calls the chronotope, the relationship a person experiences between space and time.

[Theryn Fleming]

The Bakhtin Reader contains texts written by Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Medvedev, and Valentin Voloshinov—or perhaps just Bakhtin, no one seems to know for certain. Without more conclusive evidence, Pam Morris feels it prudent to continue to credit Medvedev and Voloshinov for the texts they were originally believed to have authored. As a result of this ambiguity, Morris's aim with the reader "is to make a wide range of the writing more widely available so that readers can judge for themselves and possibly extend its relevance to yet other areas of thinking" (p. 4) and she does this by viewing the texts as a dialogue and tracing the creative process between them. Morris points out that the recurrence of themes, etc. in the texts supports both the argument for a single author (Bakhtin) and the argument for a group of authors working closely together. Of course, this question of authorship is rather ironic given the subject matter of the reader. All the texts concern the nature of discourse, in particular, "self and other, event and open-ended continuity, borderzone and outsideness, interactive creative process and social evaluation, dialogic and monologic" (p. 5).

[Plamen Miltenoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

p. 58. The word is two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses the "one" in relation to the "other."

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

decent distillation, but not much value-added paratext (cf. the dentith reader).