ABSTRACT

Bakhtin's neo-idealist line of genre theory thus comprises two distinct but related categories, chronotope and carnival, each of which, despite their common emphasis on the corporeality of the body, represents a specific attempt to overcome the contradictions in Bakhtin's thought occasioned by his turn to language and the influence of his 'materializing' colleagues Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev. Bakhtin's first literary exemplar is the 'adventure' time of the Greek 'novel', which lacks any natural which might have introduced into it a temporal order and indices on a human scale, which might have connected it to the repetitive aspects of natural and human life. The theory of the chronotope is both a product of this deficiency and an attempt to rectify it, both conceptually flawed and pragmatically compromised. If carnival is more strident than the chronotope in undermining the centrality of discourse in Bakhtin's thought, it is also considerably weaker as a basis for a theory of genre.