Volume 39, Number 15 · September 24, 1992
Revealing Bakhtin
By Aileen Kelly
Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
by Gary Saul Morson, by Caryl Emerson
Stanford University Press, 530 pp., $14.95 (paper)
In the mid-1960s, a book called Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, by an unknown Russian then in his seventies, came to the notice of literary critics in the West. His other two main works, a book on Rabelais and a volume of essays on the novel, were then soon translated. Two decades later, in many academic circles in Europe and the US, Mikhail Bakhtin is regarded as one of the leading thinkers of this century. His work is at the center of sophisticated critical debate, which seems often to lose sight of what, to most of Bakhtin's readers, is its main interest: the freshness and originality of his reading of Dostoevsky and Rabelais. If there is such a thing as 'Bakhtinism,' it is here that one should begin to look for it.
Review, 5641 words
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