[lbo-talk] I Contain Multitudes

[uvj at vsnl.com]

LRB
http://www.lrb.co.uk/

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