strong support for laughter promoting cognition
What made Bakhtin worth quoting on laughter as a form of cognition in a closeness that is inside out, upside down, and dismembers what we have become used to is contained in Epic and Novel, the first essay in this book. I quote:
Of special significance in this process of demolishing distance is the comical origin of these genres: they derive from folklore (popular laughter). It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance. As a distanced image a subject cannot be comical; it must be brought close. Everything that makes us laugh is close at hand, all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity. Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. As it draws an object to itself and makes it familiar, laughter delivers the object into the fearless hands of investigative experiment--both scientific and artistic--and into the hands of free experimental fantasy. Familiarization of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making possible free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization. (p. 23).
dialogic imagination review
this supplier made the process exceptionally easy. The book came in very good condition and on time. The book itself may be considered a difficult read due to the nature of Bakhtin's language, but, overall this text has been very helpful in relation to my lit classes.
Dialogic Imagination
Excellent condition.Excellent translation of Bakhtin whose writing is a Russian take on phenomenology. In the Dialogic Imagination he considers ficition writing--I enjoyed discovering his analysis of the "road" or journey.
Conversation vs. Generic Being
Bakhtin is quite a character, and much more accessible as a writer than the reviewer below might suggest in this volume. He has been regarded as the most important theorist of the novel, perhaps ever. But when he celebrates "the novel," it is not always obvious if he's discussing actual novels, an idea ubernovel, or a quality that is novel. I prefer the latter interpretation, but all three are possible.
The crown jewel of this collection of essays is the third one, on the crhonotope. Here, Bakhtin inquires into what amounts to genres of being in narrative space and time. The vampire's lair, the old western saloon, the medieval castle... These chronotopes circulate around in our heads, and can get dangerous if you try to actualize them in the wrong way. Bakhtin himself experienced the horrors of the Stalinist version of the Worker's Paradise chronotope. Enter "the novel", the potential for nongeneric being, open-ended action. That's freedom, no?
Meanwhile, it's great fun to inquire into how the chronotopes in your neighborhood operate, and perhaps to unpack them. Ideals in the U.S. about how a "perfect American" may move and have his/her being might be a good place to start, assuming introspection is not yet so unpatriotic as to become illegal yet...
Bakhtin at his best
I was introduced the Bakhtin, by way of this book, in my grad literary theory course. I found him at the time to be a long-winded individual who took 200 pages to say what could have been said in 50. How wrong I was.I've since become very enamored of Bakhtin's ideas and I think now that this collection was a wonderful place to start. Yes, Bakhtin is demanding but once you step up to the challenge you will find yourself rewarded beyond your wildest dreams.
The key to this whole collection is the final essay, Discourse in the Novel. This is perhaps his most influential work and it contains some very interesting ideas about the novel, the definition of language and how labguages interact with one another. I would not recommend that a newcomer to Bakhtin start here. If you pick up this volume start with the first essay, Epic and Novel, and go from there. The writing gets progressively more dense and the ideas build on each other so you'll be quite lost (like I was) if you try to tackle Discourse first.
