ABSTRACT
Contemporary readers of Bakhtin may be surprised at his optimism about the possibility of freedom of consciousness, and the possibility of liberation from ideological hegemony of dominant discourses, especially when one notices that Bakhtin was writing, theorizing, and living under one of the most authoritarian regimes in Russian history, when both the everyday world and the intellectual world were dominated by absolute discourses of political ideologies; when heteroglossia in the way he envisioned it seemed most unlikely to happen in his contemporary social, academic, and political scenes; and when his own doctoral thesis and writings were denigrated and prevented from free public circulation by various political and ideological censorships and/or life mishaps. One can perhaps only conclude that it is the extreme material and ideological conditions of monoglossia and public intellectual closure that had infused this great writer; thinker; and researcher of human discourses, folk literature, and literary genres with the greatest hope and belief in the invincible human potential to achieve freedom of consciousness, creativity, innovation, and cultural and ideological change through what he believed to be the inherent dialogic openendedness of human utterances. His lifelong fascination with the novel as an open-ended genre and discursive space for the free juxtaposition and fruitful dialogic interaction of diverse voices (or social languages, styles, ideologies, and different consciousnesses); his detailed research of Medieval satirical literature and
Russian novels; his exposition of folk humor and carnival laughter as not merely individual reaction to some isolated “comic” event but public, collective practices of social and ideological critique; and his theory of language as dialogic interaction all point to his immense passion for and belief in the potential liberative power of human agency and local creativity even in the face of absolute ideological domination and official closure. Bakhtin’s greatness cannot be fully appreciated without reading him in light of his historical and sociopolitical context and in light of how his theories and analyses provide the greatest hope and insights for others who find themselves in contexts where ideological and linguistic domination (both explicit and implicit) is an everyday reality with which one must live and struggle.
