Bakhtin

Reading for crit studies brings me back to some rough ethics classes I had during college. I had to read these essays a couple of times to get what this kooky Russian dude was talking about. But here goes...Bakhtin is concerned with the literary origins and function of the novel - as separate from greek tragedy and epic. He cites parody as a "root cause" of the novel. Parody, prominant during greek times, as well as current times, creates a sense of distance from language. Language exists not only as the "primary means of representation" but also, in the case of parody, as the OBJECT. What parody does is create a counter part to the simple representational quality of language. It allows the author to exist within his words - to speak in his own langauge versus merely existing outside of it. The author of a novel is within the conversation and is constantly criticizing himself.

Another factor of the rise of the novel is what Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia," a mixture of languages and peoples and cultures - which destroys any myth of a single unitary language. Rome was bilingual, according to Bakhtin, due to having been spread throughout the world, intersecting with other cultures and languages.

What came of this mixing was mockery and parody, soon to be applied to all languages exposed to others. Thus, the novel became the genre that could represent heteroglossia, with respect to language, it was both literary and extraliterary (outside it's own existence).

You can imagine what this affect might have on people who believed in the authority of the Bible and the Gospels.

He talks about some other stuff as well, the most interesting to me, the job of the novelist to create an "artistic hybrid" of "images" from various uses of language. The good novelist, as opposed to a hack writer, systematizes a random combination of "elements of language" to create an ongoing directly authorial language.

Okay, so all of that is a little trippy, but this guy certainly is.

If he were a film student, he'd be off screening Nick Roeg and Peter Greenaway films, in some warehouse drinking coffee and writing handwritten journals, with the occassional use of some form of speed. He'd also have a blog with it's own unique interface.

Summary: He makes his main point at the end, "Language, no longer conceived as a sacrosanct and solitary embodiment of meaning and truth, becomes merely one of many possible ways to hypothesize meaning." Pretty smart, I guess.