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 | | Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy by Ken Hirschkop ISBN-10: 9780198159612 ISBN-10: 0-19-815961-7 ISBN-13: 9780198159612 ISBN-13: 978-0-19-815961-2 Hardcover 2000-03-02 Oxford University Press, USA Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description This book makes a radical break with earlier interpretations of Bakhtin's work. Using recent Russian scholarship, Ken Hirschkop explodes many of the myths which have surrounded Bakhtin and his work and lays the ground for a new, more historically acute sense of his achievement. Through a comprehensive reading of Bakhtin's work, Hirschkop demonstrates that his discussion of the philosophy of language, literary history, popular festive culture, and the phenomenology of everyday life revolved around a lifelong search for a new kind of modern ethical culture. A detailed examination of the major works reveals the careful interweaving of philosophical and historical argument which makes Bakhtin at once so compelling and so frustrating a writer. Hirschkop treats Bakhtin not as a metaphysician or a philosopher for the ages, but as a writer inevitably drawn into the historical conflicts produced by a modernizing and democratizing Europe. As a consequence, Bakhtin becomes a more sober but also more original writer, with a striking contribution to make to the definition of the democratic project. | ||
Reviews | ||
A completely new Bakhtin. This book produces a picture of Mikhail Bakhtin completely new to a general English-language readership. Hirschkop's analysis is rendered in lucid, fluent, often funny prose, largely devoid of the forest of academic jargon one might expect to find in such a volume; he draws on a huge variety of texts of Bakhtin's never seen in English, and some never published at all. And his unabashedly opinionated reading of the existing Bakhtin scholarship, complete with frank appraisals of the failings of many of the best-known English works on Bakhtin, is welcome, useful, often funny, and even more often devastatingly accurate. Deflating many of the prevalent myths, legends, apocrypha, and anecdotes about the elusive Russian critic, Hirschkop argues for a Bakhtinian aesthetic of dialogue as a feature of radical, utopian democracy. He has not only rescued Bakhtin from his academic fans -- a worthy goal in itself! -- but produced a fascinating text in its own right on the politics of aesthetics. | ||