ABSTRACT
In this dissertation I intend to argue for the existence of a significant connection between the theories of literature and culture of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) and Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman (b. 1922). There is general, if largely tacit, agreement in the academic or scholarly community that there is such a connection; however, it is generally held to refer to Bakhtin's influence on Lotman from the late 1960's and/or Bakhtin's critical views of Lotman which he expressed late in his life. The major thrust of this study, meanwhile, is to demonstrate that the critical theories of Lotman and Bakhtin are highly compatible independent of and prior to any direct influence. While they each belong to separate schools and generations, and they actually had little if anything in the way of specific, direct, formative influence on each other,l still, in many central respects they share considerably more with each other than they do both with their own contemporaries and with those whose labels they sometimes wear and whose battle trenches they frequently share. This commonality, or compatibility, as I see it, extends: (a) to their respective notions of what literature is--if not terminologically, then at least by the ramifications of these notions; (b) to the relationship of literature to other areas of culture, especially the particular manner in which literature and all of culture are related to language; (c) to methodological considerations of how we know, study
and theorize about literature. While Bakhtin and Lounan also have significant points of difference--how could they not?--including terminology, emphasis, and aspects of their methodological orientation, these differences are not nearly as striking or as fundamental as that which separates them from other theorists and schools with nominally similar orientations. And here reference must be made especially to Russian formalism, to Czech structuralism, to separate trends within the Soviet semiotics movement, and less frequently to western variants of structuralism and semiotics.2
