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11 Mar 08
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F. Bakhtin on Carnival
1. "Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by all its participants." (7)
2. "The suspension of all hierarchical precedence . . . created during carnival time a special type of communication impossible in everyday life. This led to the creation of special forms of marketplace speech and gesture, frank and free, permitting no distance between those who came in contact with each other and liberating [them] from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times." (10)
Mikhail [M.] Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (1968; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Midland Book, 1984), 7, 10.
3. "Most politically thoughtful commentators wonder, like [Terry] Eagleton, whether the 'licensed release' of carnival is not simply a form of social control of the low by the high and therefore serves the interests of the very official culture that it apparently opposes."
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 13
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Bakhtin on Double-Voicedness
1. "Discourse Types [from Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 186-204] I. Single-Voiced Words [pp. 186 ff.]
A. "Words of the first type": Direct, unmediated discourse [p. 186]
B. "Words of the second type": Objectified discourse (of a represented person) [pp. 186 ff.]
II. Double-Voiced Words: "Words of the third type" [pp. 189 ff.]
A. Passive double-voiced words
1. Unidirectional passive double-voiced words (such as stylization [and skaz]) [pp. 189 ff.]
2. Varidirectional passive double-voiced words (such as parody [and irony]) [pp. 193 ff.]
B. Active double-voiced words [such as hidden polemic and hidden dialogicality and also parody] [pp. 195 ff.]"
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 147.
2. "Alongside direct and unmediated object-oriented discourse—naming, informing, expressing, representing . . . we can also observe represented or objectified discourse . . . [such as] the direct speech of characters." (186)
3. "Direct referentially oriented discourse recognizes only itself and its object." (187)
4. "Stylization forces another person's referential (artistically referential) intention to serve its new purposes, that is, its new intentions." (189)
5. "The situation is different with parody. Here, as in stylization, the author again speaks in someone else's discourse, but in contrast to stylization parody introduces into that discourse a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the original one. The second voice, once having made its home in the other's discourse, clashes hostilely with its primordial host and forces him [or her] to serve directly opposing aims." (193)
6. "In a hidden polemic . . . , a polemical blow is struck at the other's discourse on the same theme, at the other's statement about the same object. A word, directed toward its referential object, clashes with another's word within the very object itself." (195)
7. "In hidden polemic and in dialogue, on the contrary, the other's words actively influence the author's speech, forcing it to alter itself accordingly under their influence and initiative." (197)
8. "When parody senses a fundamental resistence, a certain strength and depth to the parodied words of the other, the parody becomes complicated by tones of hidden polemic. Such parody already has a difference sound to it. The parodied discourse rings out more actively, exerts a counterforce against the author's intentions." (198)
Mikhail [M.] Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 186-87, 189, 193, 195, 197-98.
9. "1. Signifyin(g) 'can mean any number of things.'
2. It is a black term and a black rhetorical device.
3. It can mean the 'ability to talk with great innuendo.'
4. It can mean 'to carp, cajole, needle, and lie.'
5. It can mean 'the propensity to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point.'
6. It can mean 'making fun of a person or situation.'
7. It can 'also denote speaking with the hands and eyes.'
8. It is 'the language of trickery, that set of words achieving Hamlet's "direction through indirection."'
9. The Monkey 'is a "signifyer," and the Lion, therefore, is the signified.'"10. "The mastery of Signifyin(g) creates homo rhetoricus Africanus, allowing—through the manipulation of these classic black figures of Signification—the black person to move freely between two discursive universes [white and black]."
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey, A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 75
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D. Bakhtin on Socratic Dialogue
1. "Bakhtin reminds us that the 'event' of Socratic dialogue is of the nature of discourse: a questioning and testing, through speech, of a definition. This speech practice is therefore organically linked to to the man who created it (Socrates and his students), or better, speech is man [or woman] and his [or her] activity. Here, one can speak of a practice possessing a synthetic character; the practice separating the word as act, as apodeictic practice, as articulation of difference from the image as representation, as knowledge, and as idea was not yet complete when Socratic dialogue took form."
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 81.
2. "Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction." (110)
3. "And the very event that is accomplished in a Socratic dialogue (or, more precisely, that is reproduced in it) is the purely ideological event of seeking and testing truth." (111)
4. "In Plato's Apology the situation of the trial and expected death sentence determines the special character of Socrates' mode of speaking; it is the summing-up and confession of a man standing on the threshold." (111)
5. "The ideas of Socrates, of the leading Sophists and other historical figures, are not quoted here, not paraphrased, but are presented in their free and creative development against a dialogizing background of other ideas." (112)
6. "Folk-carnival 'debates' between life and death, darkness and light, winter and summer, etc., permeated with the pathos of change and the joyful relativity of all things, debates which did not permit thought to stop and congeal in one-sided seriousness or in a stupid fetish for definition or singleness of meaning—all this lay at the base of the original core of the genre. This distinguishes the Socratic dialogue from the purely rhetorical dialogue as well as from the tragic dialogue . . . . Characteristic of a Socratic dialogue are the unrestrained mèsalliances of thoughts and images. 'Socratic irony' is reduced carnival laughter." (132)
Mikhail [M.] Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 110-12, 132.
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C. Bakhtin on Polyphony
1. "A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky's novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event." (6)
2. "In actual fact, the utterly incompatible elements comprising Dostoevsky's material are distributed among several worlds and several autonomous consciousnesses; they are presented not within a single field of vision but within several fields of vision, each full and of equal worth; and it is not the material directly but these worlds, their consciousnesses with their individual fields of vision that combine in a higher unity, a unity, so to speak, of the second order, the unity of a polyphonic novel . . . . It is as if varying systems of calculation were united here in the complex unity of an Einsteinian universe (although the juxtaposition of Dostoevsky's world with Einstein's world is, of course, only an artistic comparison and not a scientific analogy)." (16)
3. "Thus the new artistic position of the author with regard to the hero in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel is a fully realized and thoroughly consistent dialogic position, one that affirms the independence, internal freedom, unfinalizability, and indeterminacy of the hero." (63)
Mikhail [M.] Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 6, 16, 63.
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