Mikhail Bakhtin and early Soviet sociolinguistics

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] Mikhail Bakhtin’s essays on the novel of the 1930s are perhaps his mot original, influential and valuable contributions to the study of European language and literature. The terms and limits of that originally have, however, seldom been systematically analysed, with most commentators content to admire the bold interweaving of sociolinguistic and literary themes which we find in these essays. The sources of Bakhtin’s ideas about the novel have been gradually coming into focus since the 1980s, but the sources of the sociolinguistic ideas embedded in these works have remained unexplored, perhaps because it is generally assumed the idea follow on from those delineated in Valentin Voloshinov’s 1929 book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, which has often been ascribed to Bakhtin himself. There is, however, a qualitative difference between the linguistic ideas in Voloshinov’s texts and those in Bakhtin’s essays of the 1930s, not least the discussion of the historical development of language and discursive relations within society and the modelling of these features in the novel as a genre. While Voloshinov’s work facilitated the transformation of Bakhtin’s early phenomenology of intersubjectivity into the account of discursive relations we find in the latter’s 1929 Dostoevskii book, both works present largely synchronic analyses quite distinct from that found in the 1934 essay. Voloshinov succeeded in transforming Bakhtin’s early ‘philosophy of the act’ and aesthetic activity into discursive terms largely through his adoption of Karl Buhler’s ‘organon model’ of the ‘speech event’ or ‘speech act’, but this left the static phenomenology of the earlier work intact. Similarly, Voloshinov and Medvedev managed to recast Bakhtin’s early account of worldview into discursive terms by adopting and sociologising the notion of style found in works by Leo Spitzer and Oskar Walzel, but again the systematic transformations of the discursive environment remained beyond the purview of the Bakhtin Circle. Where, then, did Bakhtin, from 1929 exiled in a small Kazakh town where there was very limited access to books and little contact with his erstwhile colleagues, derive the historical and sociolinguistic ideas that pervade these works

Rethinking the colonial encounter with Bakhtin (and contra Foucault)

The limitations of employing a Foucauldian framework for studying the colonial encounter are discussed and an alternative approach drawing on the work of the Bakhtin Circle is proposed. The origins of the Foucauldian approach in postcolonial studies is traced back to the emergence of Stalinist critiques of ‘bourgeois orientalism’ at the beginning of the Cold War, which proposed a dualistic model of closed discourses of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘Soviet’ orientalism. The Bakhtinian approach developed in opposition to Stalinist attempts to ‘monologise’ the critical approaches developed in the USSR, questioning the idea of closed discourses and stressing modes of engagement between different social groups and ideological positions. The second part of the article provides a case study of the emergence on Indo-European philology, which is often presented as a clear example of Western Orientalism. It is shown that this movement developed as a result of collaboration between European philologists and Indian high-caste pandits. It is shown that various agendas were pursued within philology, and that a number of different critical intersections emerged over time. It is suggested that a Bakhtinian approach, suitably revised and developed, provides a superior starting point for understanding these phenomena

Bakhtine, la sociologie du langage et le roman

Le travail de Bakhtine sur le roman dans les années 1930 a généralement été vu comme opposé aux tendances dominantes de la pensée sovietique de l'époque, ou même comme une subversion de cette pensée. Cette impression est fallacieuse, car, à la suite de son arrestation en 1929, Bakhtine a subi une perestroïka intellectuelle», en tous points aussi profonde que celle de nombre de ses contemporains. Il a, en effet, adopté les points fondamentaux du programme marriste, et fait de nombreux emprunts au travail d'intellectuels soviétiques influents. Il n'y a guère de raisons de soupçonner la sincérité de cette réorientation, même si Bakhtine fait subir à ces idées des ajustements très particuliers. Son travail des années 1930 devrait être considéré plutôt comme une contribution à la science soviétique que comme le renversement de ses principes de base, et ses idées sur la langue et la société comme beaucoup moins originales qu'elles ne le paraissaient autrefois. Si l'on veut chercher l'originalité des articles de Bakhtine des années 1930, c'est ailleurs qu'on va la trouver, dans la façon dont il a intégré la socioiinguistique soviétique naissante à la théorie du roman