see also the paragraph on centripetal forces in Dostoevsky. This might be interesting for future research.<br>
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Giorgio BertiniMikhail Bakhtin was born in Orel, south of Moscow, in 1895 and grew up in Vilnius and Odessa, cosmopolitan border towns that offered an unusually heterogeneous mix of disparate languages and cultures. He studied classics and philology at St. Petersburg (l
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megan blankenshipFor Thesis Research
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Add Sticky NotePolyphony is the distinguishing characteristic of a particular kind of novel, the polyphonic novel. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin explains how Dostoevsky creates the polyphonic novel by repositioning the idea of the novel, its truth, within multiple and various consciousnesses rather than a single consciousness and by repositioning the author of the novel alongside the characters as one of these consciousnesses, creator of the characters but also their equal (Clark and Holquist 239-52; Morson and Emerson 231-68). Bakhtin claims that this new kind of novel is no longer a direct expression of the author’s truth but an active creation of the truth in the consciousnesses of the author, the characters, and the reader, in which all participate as equals (Morson and Emerson 234-37, 251-59). This truth is a unified truth that nonetheless requires a plurality of consciousnesses: "It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that cannot in principle be fitted into the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential and is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses" (Problems 81). Such a unified truth, the unified truth of the polyphonic novel, combines several autonomous consciousnesses into "a higher unity, a unity, so to speak, of the second order," which Bakhtin explains only by analogy with "the complex unity of an Einsteinian universe" (16).
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Context, Utterance, Dialogue
Bakhtin’s early ethical work is concerned with the act rather than the word but is formative for his later work on communication and rhetoric (Morson and Emerson 25-27, 68-71). In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin rejects the "theoreticism" of traditional ethics—its construction of universal concepts, propositions, and laws—in favor of a description or phenomenology of the world that situates each actually performed act or deed within its unique, concrete context (22-28). Embracing relativity theory but not relativism (Holquist 20-23; Morson and Emerson 26), Bakhtin claims that each "I" who performs an act or deed holds a unique place within the architectonic whole of Being (Toward a Philosophy of the Act 40-41, 53-54). Because I hold such a unique place, and because my uniqueness is both given and yet to be achieved, I must actualize my uniqueness (41-42). In doing so, I join in communion with a unity, or rather a uniqueness, of an actual, once-occurrent, and never-repeatable whole (37-40). This ethical imperative (Bakhtin calls it "my non-alibi in Being"), which requires that I act out my unique place within a complex unity, remains implicit in Bakhtin’s later works on communication and helps to explain the persistent theme of unity amid differences in contemporary appropriations of Bakhtin (40).
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Public Stiky Notes
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