ABSTRACT
Discourse in the Novel' opens with as explicit a confirmation of the falseness of the Formalist/Marxist opposition as Bakhtin might have dared and, not incidentally, of the vigour of the za-Formalist trajectory discerned in Problems of Dostoevsky's Art, describing the core motivating idea of the essay as 'overcoming the divide in the study of literature between abstract 'formalism' and an equally abstract 'ideologism". One of the enduring surface difficulties in Bakhtin, as we have begun to glimpse in discussion of the poetic symbol, is that he is prepared to risk his exposition of this higher stylistics of architectonic form by couching it in terms of the novel's challenge to the modal hegemony of poetry. If genres are ways of 'seeing and conceptualizing reality', then it is the novel, hovering somewhere between the youngest of the genres and a radical challenge to any possible modal classification, that is uniquely able to 'show us what kind of world we live in'.
