ABSTRACT
The contention that M. M. Bakhtin's book on Fedor Dostoevsky is a hybrid might imply that its ostensibly incommensurable component elements are successfully fused in what will become the basis for a unified and consistent theory of literary production. The invocation of the 'imaginings of idealism' as a schismatic factor in Bakhtin is avoidable in the context of any discussion of representation, from the philosophical point of view as much as the literary. A Platonic theory of genre, seems all the more remarkable for having been reduced to the status of little more than a parenthesis, is at best static, and therefore not strictly theory of genre at all: simply, the work is to the genre as the manifest 'object' is to the Idea. The 'primary' or inward process of representation projected by broadly idealist conceptions of the operation of consciousness denies the primacy of the object as posited by broadly Realist projections of the nature of the material world.
