Mikhail Bakhtin
Between Phenomenology and Marxism

Exploration of the ambivalent philosophic foundation of the work of Bakhtin and contemporary critics.

Michael F. Bernard-Donals (Author)

9780521466479, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 February 1995

208 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.2 cm, 0.27 kg

The language theory of Mikhail Bakhtin does not fall neatly under any single rubric - 'dialogism,' 'marxism,' 'prosaics,' 'authorship' - because the philosophic foundation of his writing rests ambivalently between phenomenology and Marxism. The theoretical tension of these positions creates philosophical impasses in Bakhtin's work, which have been neglected or ignored partly because these impasses are themselves mirrored by the problems of antifoundationalist and materialist tendencies in literary scholarship. In Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism Michael Bernard-Donals examines various incarnations of phenomenological and materialist theory - including the work of Jauss, Fish, Rorty, Althusser, and Pecheux - and places them beside Bakhtin's work, providing a contextualised study of Bakhtin, a critique of the problems of contemporary critics, and an original contribution to literary theory.

Preface
1. Problems with formalism
2. Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology
3. Reception and hermeneutics: the search for ideology
4. The Marxist texts
5. Science and ideology
6. Science, praxis, and change
7. Bakhtin, the problem of knowledge and literary studies
bibliography
index.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]