Abstract

This work begins by examining Mikhail Bakhtin's work in relation to the critical efforts of his contemporaries, characterized at the outset by an anti-formalist trend in the west since the 1930s. It proceeds in the second chapter to link that early work to what is central to all of Bakhtin's work, a philosophy of language which has at its center a radical revision of the social relations of individuals, as well as the role language plays within those relations. This revision of language as medium rather than as object, and its resultant deprivileging of the aesthetic object seems to provide a way to combat formalism's blatant privileging of "artistic" language and its inability to connect any language to a social context. It further attempts to redefine a number of the terms with which critical studies has to deal, including notions of literariness, the social, and intersubjective relations. The work of the subsequent four chapters traces the interconnections between Bakhtin's work and four kinds of critical work which grow immediately out of the post-formal critical situation traced in the introductory chapter: H. R. Jauss's "aesthetics of reception," Wolfgang Iser's reading theory, Stanley Fish's theory of communities, and certain varieties of historical materialism. These "schools", if you will, are similar to one another in that their concerns are trying to get past the "art" vs. "life" distinction left over from the formalists; and they are similar to Bakhtin in that they attempt to do this by way of intersubjective or social language theories. Bakhtin's model is held up not as a remedy or solution to these problems, but as an alternative, which nevertheless presents its own problematics