ABSTRACT
This chapter assess Bakhtin's impact and utility under these two successive headings, namely literary studies and the Humanities, before offering a 'last word' about the world 'beyond' both literature and the Humanities. Pragmatics in general and speech act theory in particular seem to resonate with elements of Bakhtin's and Voloshinov's translinguistics. The 'universality' of dialogic relations therefore universalizes the possibility of intertextual relations. The discussion of disciplines, their place in the Humanities, and the Humanities' relationship to other forms of knowledge shows once again the persistence in Bakhtin's thought of questions of 'worlds' and the imagined or real 'boundaries' between them. Dialogic thought and the categories it produces, although they are, as the chapter have seen, intimately related to literature, are not in any sense limited either to literature or culture in its conventional sense.
