Bakhtin, Genres, and Temporality

Abstract

patterns. In Bakhtin's terms, the great systems imagine the world entirely in terms of what is given and thus leave no room for what is created. The result is that nothing is surprising because everything is ready-made: An object is ready-made, the linguistic means for its depiction are ready-made, the artist himself is ready-made, and his world view is ready-made. And here with ready-made means, in light of a ready-made world view, the ready-made poet reflects a ready-made object. But in fact the object is created in the process of creativity, as are the poet himself, his world view, and his means of expression.2 A fundamental impulse of Bakhtin's thought was to formulate an alternative to such reductionism. Properly conducted, humanistic disciplines describe a world in which events are irre- ducibly particular, individuals are partially free, and time is con- sequently open. It is therefore especially ironic that Bakhtin's American admirers should have consistently presented him as an adherent of one or another great system of explanation. Despite his frequent attacks on structuralism and semiotics, Jakobsonians initially claimed him for both; as deconstruction gained adherents, a poststructuralist Bakhtin emerged; and despite his unremitting attacks on Marxism, Bakhtin has been repeatedly treated as an adherent of that ideology.

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