Caryl Emerson, PhD in Philology, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. E-mail: cemerson@princeton.edu
Any boom calls forth a backlash and a trashing – and Bakhtin has been trashed often, for many reasons. In this article I consider the recent biography of Bakhtin written by Aleksei Korovashko in the history of anti-Bakhtinistics, and attempt to evaluate the “Korovashko tactic”: where, in my view, it goes wrong, and what lessons we might learn from it in light of Bakhtin’s teaching (especially his theory of love). I then discuss two more productive approaches to criticizing Bakhtin: one devoted to Bakhtin and the body (Dick McCaw), the other to Bakhtin and the spirit (Mikhail Epstein).
Mikhail Bakhtin; biography; postmodernism; outsideness; Golden Rule; Diamond Rule; Alexey Korovashko; Mikhail Epstein; Dick McCaw.
01.08.2021
12.09.2021
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