ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the early French reception of Mikhail Bakhtin's works, in fact the first decade, from 1967 until 1980. It concentrates on Julia Kristeva's article of 1967, 'Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman', which is one of the first articles ever written in French on Bakhtin. Clive Thomson identifies Kristeva and Todorov as the two landmarks in Bakhtin studies. The chapter focuses on the notions of appropriation and distortion as they can be defined with the help of Bakhtin, in order to put in perspective Kristeva's reading of Bakhtin. The chronology of the translations into French of Bakhtin's works is important. Kristeva's interpretation of Bakhtin is particularly fascinating. More symptomatically still, Kristeva relates this double orientation of language, this intrinsic dialogue, to the double aspect of language as expressed in the structuralist binary oppositions between langue and parole, between the syntagmatic and the systematic (or paradigmatic) axes or with Roman Jakobson's notions of code and message.
