ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, I will take up the relation between Saussure and Bakhtin which, despite received opinion, is continuous rather than conflictual. The distinction between Saussure’s presumable formalism and Bakhtin’s presumable historicism is a mirage. Their relation is supplemental, not exclusive. Even more than Louis Althusser (1964, 1970), Bakhtin was the final piece of the puzzle of theory, the bow that festooned the package despite his own hesitation in being so generous. I will trace both the concrete and the scholarly history of this rapprochement between French and Soviet thinking—here Julia Kristeva plays a crucial role—before taking up its self-evidence from the point of view of critical history. Bakhtin overlooks the real foundation of his discovery of the shift from epic to novel. It lies with the one writer he never discusses but who is central to his argument about the emergence of the novel as a form and the nature of discourse as a whole—Shakespeare. Chapter 2 will expand Bakhtin’s notion of the origins of the novel by relocating it in Shakespeare, particularly in Lear’s Rabelaisian Fool, in Falstaff, and in Hamlet.
