The Bakhtin Reader

Incessantly cited by critics, Bakhtin's work nonetheless remains relatively unavailable: partly through lack of suitable editions, partly because no individual text conveys all the key concepts or arguments. This anthology provides in a convenient format a good selection of the writing by Bakhtin and of that attributed to Voloshinov and Medvedev. It introduces readers to the aspects most relevant to literary and cultural studies and gives a focused sense of Bakhtin's central ideas and the underlying cohesiveness of his thinking. An introductory essay considers the problems of establishing exact authorship within the Bakhtin 'school', and then examines the key ideas and issues Bakhtin pursued throughout his work, with an account of their development and interrelatedness. In particular, his innovative thinking on the productive interaction of consciousness and speech is emphasized and a sense of the 'dialogic' interaction with other current critical and cultural approaches is imparted. The introduction is augmented by a contextualizing commentary accompanying the selected texts and by a glossary of the key terminology. Readers new to the Bakhtin 'school' will find this book an invaluable introduction to a complex and scattered body of work. Those already familiar with some of the texts will find further material and fresh insights.