“From the prehistory of Novelistic Discourses”

“From the prehistory of Novelistic Discourses”

Mikhail Bakhtin(1895-1975)

v Introduction:-

            A Russian literary theorist, Bakhtin has been a great influence on the contemporary theory of Discourse analysis. He is best known by his works named The Dialogic Imagination (1981), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986), Rabelais and his World (1968), and Problems of Dostoevski’s Poetics (1984). In these studies, there is a critique of Russian Formalism and an outline of his characteristic theme of “dialogism.” He criticizes Formalism for its abstraction, for its failure to analyse the content of literary works, and for the difficulty it finds in analysing linguistic and ideological changes. This critique is then extended to linguistics, especially the Saussurean. In his view, the purely linguistic approach to both language and literature is highly limited in scope. It tends to isolate linguistic units or literary texts from their social context, having no analysis to offer of the relations that exist between both individual speakers and texts.

            Bakhtin’s proposal is for a historical poetics or a “translinguistics” which can show how all social intercourse is generated from verbal communication and interaction, and that linguistic signs are conditioned by the social organization of the participants. In his later work, Bakhtin develops his historical poetics into a theory of “speech genres” or “typical forms of utterances.” He claims that the weakness of Saussure’s linguistics is that it focuses solely on individual utterances and is unable to analyse how they are combined into relatively stable types of utterance. Although his speech theory remains incomplete, Bakhtin was ambitious to apply it to everything from proverbs to long novels by analysing their common verbal nature.

            With these major intellectual influences in the background, the Postmodern literature in the second half of the twentieth century grew to show greater impact of the new ideas on the continent and in America, with comparatively much less impact on the literature of the British islands. Mostly used as a periodising concept to mark literature in the later half of the twentieth century, Postmodernism is also used, as we have earlier discussed, as a description of literary and formal characteristics such as linguistic play, new modes of narrational self-reflexivity, and referential frames within frames. Going chronologically and genrewise, we shall try to explore the nature and extent of Postmodernism the literature in Britain absorbed and reflected during the period beginning with the 1950’s.

v His concept of novel:-

            In 1941, therefore Mikhail Bakhtin called novel,

“a young, new ever-changing and developing genre.”

He claimed it as

“the leading hero in the drama of he literary development in our time précised by because it reflect the tendencies of a new world still in the making”

            According  to Bakhtin, all other literary forms were formed during the “eras of closed and deaf monoglossia’ In contrast novel emerged and matures when polyglossia replaced the European ‘World Monoglossia during the Renaissance. The novel of the ancient times, could not develop its full potential because the society the n had no real concept of the future. The internationals and interlinguas relationship with the world emerges form socially isolated and culturally insulted society particular in Europe. This helped in the development of the novel as a genre which is defined as polyglossia.

Bakhtin’s characteristic of novel:-

            Bakhtin enumerates three basic and distinguishing characteristics of the novel as a generic category:

Stylistic three-dimensionality which is linked with the multi- language consciousness realized in the novel.

The radical change its effect in the temporal coordinate of he literary image.

The new zone of he maximal contact with the present in  all its open –endedness.

Thus, Bakhtin locates the genre of novel as “Maximal contact with the present. In its temporal co-coordinates. He states that the two important characteristics of the novel are “the spirit of process and inclusiveness.’

            The novel for Bakhtin is a process ad not product and is therefore in conclusive and open end and better qualified to represent reality deeply, essentially and as sensitively than any other form to literary production. Being plastic in nature it is not colonic. It keeps no epic distance between the image of man and real life.