Bakhtin

Subject classification: this is a anthropology resource.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
Born	16 November 1895
Died	7 March 1975
Nationality	Russian
Occupation	Philosopher

Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1984). trans. by Caryl Emerson. ed. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press. 

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (November 17, 1895 – March 7, 1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who wrote influential works of literary and rhetorical theory and criticism. His works, dealing with a variety of subjects, have inspired groups of thinkers such as neo-Marxists, structuralists, and semioticians, who have all incorporated Bakhtinian ideas into theories of their own. Among the circle of Russian/Soviet writers who made important contributions to aesthetic analysis during the first third of the 20th Century (including Yury Tynyanov and Boris Eikhenbaum), Bakhtin has been the main contributor; he was among the leaders of the Formalism circle in Leningrad who helped develop a new "materialistic" view of Russian literature. After some time out of favour, his work has recently become fashionable once more.

Key Ideas

The Utterance

For Bakhtin the basic unit of language was the utterance, defined as the continual speech of one voice. The structuralist tendency to reduce language to the basic unit of the word ignores the dialogic nature of the speech act.

Heteroglossia

Heteroglossia literally means many-voice-ness.

External links

• The Bakhtin Circle, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Bakhtin Centre, University of Sheffield
• A Bakhtin profile by James P. Zappen
• "INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY - The Battle over Mikhail Bakhtin" by Matt Steinglass, in Lingua Franca, (April 1998).