ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Bakhtin's ideas on the history of literature and its place in the philosophy of culture, building on his adoption of Cassirer's conception of myth as the fundamental starting point of cultural consciousness, and looking forward to the development of his idea of carnival. The incremental secularization of society was accompanied by a secularization of literature this was the key formative characteristic of the development of literary genre, and it involved what he referred to as the centuries-long process of expunging the other's sacred word. Hirschkop attributes Bakhtin's departure from ethical philosophy to internal problems within the scope of his philosophy. Secular literature is literature with a free choice of genre, but with no particular genre of its own, and therefore needing to borrow and reuse other and sometimes multiple genres. Freidenberg reiterates the dualism of tragedy and comedy in ancient literature in The Poetics of Plot and Genre, in the passage highlighted by Bakhtin, which Brandist translates.
