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

Description

The innovative thinking associated with the name of Mikhail Bakhtin offers new approaches across a wide range of current theoretical concerns. At the centre of the work is an account of language that unites rigorous semiotic analysis with an emphasis upon discourse as fundamentally social: as "dialogic". This key concept combines theoretical accessibility with the potential to generate new thinking in such diverse fields as linguistics, feminist and Marxist studies, anthropology, reader-response, cultural and postcolonial studies, and aesthetics. This reader offers a comprehensive introduction to the main works. The extracts included have been selected to provide a full sense of the four major areas of thought: discourse, novelistic form, literature and ideology, and carnival. Each extract is prefaced with an explanatory introduction to contextualize it within the general body of ideas and to clarify its main points.

Pam Morris is Director of the Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK