Behind Bakhtin: Russian formalism and Kristeva's intertextuality

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Volumn 28, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 1-20

  Lesic Thomas, Andrea ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61449109105     PISSN: 02648334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/para.2005.28.3.1     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London, Routledge, 2000), 2
2. In his short article from 1970 entitled 'L' étrangère', Barthes stressed as one of her great achievements the introduction of the notion that the science of languages is a necessarily dialogic endeavour, thinking of itself as simultaneously science and writing, analysing itself and its own critical procedures as it analyses different types of languages (Roland Barthes, Oeuvres complètes II: 1966-1973 (Paris, Seuil, 1994), 860-2)
3. Julia Kristeva, 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman', Sé miotikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris, Seuil, 1969), 82-112; 85
4. But also of other disciplines within cultural studies; see, for example, Intertextuality and the Media: from Genre to Everyday Life, edited by Ulrike H. Meinhof and Jonathan Smith (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000)
5. According to Dosse, Kristeva chose to present Bakhtin, because she 'had immediately understood structuralism's historical limitations and intended to palliate these shortcomings with Bakhtin, and lend "dynamism to structuralism"' (François Dosse, History of Structuralism, 2 vols, translated by Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998), vol. 2, 55)
6. Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003), 6
7. Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine: le principe dialogique (Paris, Seuil, 1981), 95. It needs to be said that Todorov's presentation of Bakhtin's thought is on the whole much more faithful to Bakhtin than to Kristeva's notion of intertextuality
8. Judith Still and Michael Worton, 'Introduction' in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, edited by Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990), 1-44, 17
9. However, the radical (Derridian) distinction between the spoken and the written use of language is not particularly important to Bakhtin, and does not play a large part in his thought. Besides, as Laurent Jenny notes, Kristeva enlarged the notion of 'text' to the point where it refers not just to literary works and written texts, but also to oral use of language, and social or unconscious symbolic systems (Laurent Jenny, 'La Stratégie de la forme', Poétique 27 (1976), 257-81; 261)
10. Robert Stam, 'Mikhail Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique', in Postmodernism and Its Discontents, edited by E. Ann Kaplan (London, Verso, 1988), 116-45; 132
11. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1996)
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moskva, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979), 58-68
13. See Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity', in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, translated by Vadim Liapunov (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990)
14. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, 'Figures in the Corpus', in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 3-36; 18
15. I would argue, though, that with such an expanded meaning the term 'text' becomes rather meaningless, as it covers nearly all types of human communication, both as process and as product, without telling us very much about how such communication takes place. Soviet Semiotics, through its concept of 'semiotic modelling systems', has found ways of discussing social communication in similar ways to what Kristeva attempts to do here, but in a much more subtle and productive manner. See, for example, B.A. Uspenskij's 1974 article 'Historia sub specie semioticae' (in Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, edited by Daniel P. Lucid (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Soviet Semioticians already started developing these ideas in the second half of the 1960s, and their influence on Kristeva's concept of 'intertextuality' is something else that needs to be closely examined
16. Celia Britton, 'The Dialogic Text and the Texte Pluriel', Occasional Papers 14 (1974), 52-68; 55. I am grateful to Karine Zbinden for pointing this paper out to me
17. Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London, Routledge, 1995), 94
18. Théorie de la littérature, edited by Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, Seuil, 1965)
19. Boris Eikhenbaum, 'The Theory of the Formal Method', Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1971), 3-37; 19. This article will henceforward be referred to as TFM
20. Roman Jakobson, 'Sketch 1', Recent Russian Poetry, ('Nabrosok pervyi', Noveishaia russkaia pocziia, Prague, 1921
21. quoted in Readings in Russian Poetics, 8)
22. Victor Shklovsky, 'Art as Device', Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1-14
23. Tzvetan Todorov comments on the disparity between the two concepts which seemed to exist together in the Formalists' (or at least Shklovskii's) writing: the concept of artistic 'autotelism, or the absence of any external function' with the concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization, 'making it strange') which would imply that art does have an external function, namely to renew our perception of the world. (Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and its Theorists, translated by Catherine Porter (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1987), 20-4)
24. A similar chronology, with a detailed discussion of the evolution of Formalist ideas from the concept of 'machine' to 'organism' to 'system' can be found in Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1984)
25. Shklovskii, 'Literature without a Plot: Rozanov', Theory of Prose, 189-205; 190
26. Tynianov, 'On Literary Evolution', Readings in Russian Poetics, 66-78; 77. Henceforward OLE
27. Pavel Medvedev, 'The Formal (Morphological) Method, or Scholarly Salieriism', translated by Ann Shukman, in Bakhtin School Papers, edited by Ann Shukman (Oxford: RPT Publications, 1983), 51-65; 59
28. Roman Jakobson, 'On Realism in Art', Readings in Russian Poetics, 38-46; 43
29. 'The Dominant', 83
30. Tynianov and Jakobson, 'Problems in the Study of Literature and Language', Readings in Russian Poetics, 79-81
31. However, later Bakhtin comes closer to the Formalist theory of genres. See Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999)
32. See also Igor Shaitanov, 'The Concept of the Generic Word: Bakhtin and the Russian Formalists' in Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, edited by Carol Adlam, Rachel Falconer, Vitalii Makhlin and Alastair Renfrew (Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 233-53
33. 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman', 100