Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975)

Starts off increasingly edifying and amusing, putting things in order, providing a wealth of references to medieval literature, elucidating, moving, opening one's eyes on Rabelais' humor and so on.

After about a third the style started to get on my nerves, and the suspicion that at least some of the sophistry is due to obligatory Marxist ideals and communistic dialectics (Hegelianism?) gets stronger and more aggressive (and I say that as someone who never read either Marx or Hegel, so no guarantee that that was the problem).

While reading the last part I was almost completely numb. No fun with Gogol.… (more)

The earliest major work (1919-1921) of Bakhtin. Contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse. This is the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism.… (more)