6 Quotes & Sayings By Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin (born February 7, 1899, died April 25, 1975) was a Russian literary theorist and philosopher, known for his work in the context of structuralism and post-structuralism. He is also well known for having introduced the concept of the dialogic principle to the English language. Bakhtain was the son of a wealthy family. His father, Nikolai Mikhailovich Bakhtin, was an architect and an officer in the Imperial Russian Navy Read more

His mother, Ekaterina Dmitrievna Maksheyeva, was descended from an old noble Pskovian family tracing its line back to the sixteenth century. Because of his father's career as an officer, Mikhail Bakhtin spent most of his childhood years in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

He attended school at Neskuchnyi Dvor (private school) and later St. Petersburg Gymnasium. He also attended St.

Petersburg University from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1923. He continued his studies at University of Leipzig where he received a Ph.D degree in 1925 for a thesis on "The Problem of Dostoevsky's Poetics." That same year he published a critical edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky's works that included a map of Russia based on descriptions from these novels along with annotations that aided readers' understanding of how each character fits into the spatial scheme of Russia as a whole. In 1927 he published another work on Dostoevsky called "The Problem of Dostoevsky's Poetics." The following year he published "Dialogic Imagination," a book that presented an elaborate system for analyzing literature built on the dialogic principle by which any text necessarily contains more than one viewpoint or point of view along with multiple voices within these viewpoints.

In 1930 he published "Cultural Mythology," a book that looked at recurring themes in Russian folk tales and popular literature from ancient times to the present day to reveal the underlying patterns that give these stories their meaning by showing how they repeat across cultures and time periods. In 1932 he published "Notes Toward a Methodology for the Study of Dostoevsky," which offered his own interpretation of Dostoevsky's works along with reasons why they can be understood through dialogic analysis instead of psychological analysis but also explained why he believed psychology could still be used to interpret works like this one by saying: "Psychology can and ought to study

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As a result of the work done by all these stratifying force in language, there are no "neutral" words and forms - words and forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived it socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words! ), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easy to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. Mikhail Bakhtin
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What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system. Mikhail Bakhtin
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Every command slaps liberty in the face. Mikhail Bakhtin
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The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way. Mikhail Bakhtin
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Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. Mikhail Bakhtin