ABSTRACT
Books such as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Rabelais and his World, and the essays published in English as The Dialogic Imagination have established Bakhtin as a leading theorist of the novel. Dialogism, however, resists being confined to any exclusively “literary” application. Indeed, the fixity of boundaries between “literary” and “extra-literary” discourse is precisely what it questions, even in those of his works that seem most conventionally “literary.” There is a certain Russian broadness that clings to dialogism, making it difficult to use in restricted doses. In the light of dialogism, literature can never be completely disentangled from its capacity to serve as a metaphor for other aspects of existence.
