ABSTRACT
As we have seen, Bakhtin is a wide-ranging, imaginative and suggestive writer, but he is not a systematic one. The difficulties of constructing a ‘system’ out of his work-even if one should conceive such a misplaced ambition-are of course compounded if one takes ‘Bakhtin’ to include Voloshinov and Medvedev as well. So his value to us now is certainly not that of a ready-made interpretative system which can be ‘applied’ to a range of writing, to solve the various intellectual challenges and difficulties which have, to some degree, transformed the way we think about language and literature over the last twenty-five years. Yet his particular intellectual trajectory, and the extraordinary history in which it occurred, lend a remarkable weight to the various and sometimes contradictory positions to be found in the writing of Bakhtin and his circle. As a result, they press upon the diverse intellectual currents of Europe and America from unexpected directions, dialogizing in turn New Critical formalism, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction and some versions of historicism. In this chapter I wish to give an outline of that dialogue, recognizing not only its evident material limitations-a thorough attempt to interanimate Bakhtin and the intellectual history of the West is of course way beyond the scope of such a book as this-but also recognizing that in principle such a dialogue can never be completed, must always be provisional while there remains the chance for another voice to join it.
