UDC

81-13

Authors

Oleg Ye. Osovskiy
National Research Ogarev Mordovia State University; ul. Bol’shevistskaya 68, 430005, Saransk, Respublika Mordoviya, Russian Federation;
e-mail: osovskiy_oleg@mail.ru

Abstract

This article dwells on the reception of Mikhail Bakhtin’s key ideas and concepts by Western theory from the second half of the 1960s to the 2010s. The paper aimed to describe the special features of this process and its impact on the state of the humanities in general and literary criticism in particular. The most important tool of this analysis is Bakhtin’s concept of “great time”. Its context allows us to form a canonical list of names and ideas that ensures the universalization of meanings of literary and cultural values in their historical evolution. The paper emphasizes the importance of not only seeing in “great time” the periods and peculiarities of reception of Bakhtin’s legacy by the Western humanities, but also considering Bakhtin’s key ideas. In his later notes, Bakhtin accentuates the complex nature of the development of modern literary criticism in the general context of the history of culture. Looking at the history of literature and culture from the viewpoint of “great time” (much due to A. Veselovsky and his Historical Poetics) he declares the necessity of crossing the boundaries of the “little world” created by the 19th-century literary scholarship and reveals a tendency to avoid big problems in modern literary criticism. The introduction of Bakhtin’s ideas into modern Western theory helped the humanities to overcome the structuralist crisis and adopt the anthropocentric vector of Bakhtin’s theory. The works by J. Kristeva, T. Todorov, R. Wellek, M. Holquist, K. Clark, C. Emerson, G.S. Morson, and others demonstrate the evolution of Bakhtin’s reception: first as the author of groundbreaking books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais, then as a leading literary theorist and original philosopher of language and, finally, as the creator of one of the most significant philosophical and aesthetic concepts of the 20th century.

Keywords

Mikhail Bakhtin, Western theory, Western humanities, intellectual revolution, “great time”, polyphony, carnivalesque

References

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