ABSTRACT

Although the works of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin span a greater part of the twentieth century, his opus went largely unappreciated during Stalin's regime, and until recently was not widely disseminated in the West. When several American critics, including Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, began to translate and disseminate his texts in the 1980s, these rapidly gained enormous popularity in literary fields; many of his ideas resonated with postmodern concerns, since they involved both a type of social criticism adopted by cultural studies, and a linguistic orientation characteristic of deconstruction, a conjunction that has often allowed for written "dialogue" between the two groups over Bakhtin's textual corpse.