Vol 29 No.12
dated 21 June 2007
I Contain Multitudes http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n12/eagl01_.html
Terry Eagleton
Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World by Graham Pechey · Routledge, 238 pp, £19.99
For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives, global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business. Most of the mouth-filling terms he coined - dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope, heteroglossia, multi-accentuality - have passed into the lexicon of contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to appropriate him for their own agendas. Is he a Marxist, neo-Kantian, religious humanist, discourse theorist, literary critic, cultural sociologist, ethical thinker, philosophical anthropologist, or all these things together? http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n12/eagl01_.html