The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedvev, Voloshinov

The innovative thinking associated with the name of Mikhail Bakhtin offers new approaches across a wide range of current theoretical concerns. At the centre of the work is an account of language that unites rigorous semiotic analysis with an emphasis upon discourse as fundamentally social: as "dialogic". This key concept combines theoretical accessibility with the potential to generate new thinking in such diverse fields as linguistics, feminist and Marxist studies, anthropology, reader-response, cultural and postcolonial studies, and aesthetics. This reader offers a comprehensive introduction to the main works. The extracts included have been selected to provide a full sense of the four major areas of thought: discourse, novelistic form, literature and ideology, and carnival. Each extract is prefaced with an explanatory introduction to contextualize it within the general body of ideas and to clarify its main points.