31 Quotes by Mikhail Bakhtin

To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of “languages,” styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation.

This is a profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole outlook on the world.

But in fact Dostoevsky found and was capable of perceiving multi-leveledness and contradictoriness not in the spirit, but in the objective social world. In this social world, planes were not stages but opposing camps, and the contradictory relationships among them were not the rising or descending course of an individual personality, but the condition of society. The multi-leveledness and contradictoriness of social reality was present as an objective fact of the epoch. The.

What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system.

Histories are like novels in that they set out to provide more or less comprehensive accounts of social systems.

But histories differ from novels in that they insist on a homology between the sequence of their own telling, the form they impose to create a coherent explanation in the form of a narrative on the one hand, and the sequence of what they tell on the other.

Engelhardt gets to the heart of the multi-leveledness in Dostoevsky’s novels when he writes: “The particular form of a hero’s ideological relationship to the world becomes the principle behind a purely artistic orientation of the hero to his surroundings.

In shaping that variety in the development of the novel, and in shaping that artistic prose which we will provisionally call “dialogic” and which, as we have said, leads to Dostoevsky, two genres from the realm of the serio-comical have definitive significance: the Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire.

In Dostoevsky, two thoughts are already two people, for there are no thoughts belonging to no one and every thought represents an entire person. This.