Key concepts associated with Bakhtin's works include dialogism, heteroglossia, the USSR. His work therefore only gradually became known outside of Russia.
As a literary theorist, Bakhtin emerged out of the school of Russian Structuralism, but attempted to understand the method of literary meaning in dialogue as a series of structures inherent in the text and culture surrounding the text.
Major works
Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics (1929)
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Popular Culture in Middle Ages and the Renaissance: the context of François Rabelais
External link
The Bakhtin Circle, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/b/bakhtin.htm)
The Bakhtin Centre (http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A_C/bakh/bakhtin.html)
Bakhtin, whose primary concern was language, argued that a struggle between forces simultaneously working to separate and unite those things existing in both nature and culture was at the very center of existence.
Bakhtin was born in Orel, Russia, outside of Moscow, to an old family of the nobility.
Later, in 1923, Bakhtin was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a bone disease that ultimately led to the amputation of his leg in 1938.
Bakhtin follows the nineteenth-century German novelist and critic Otto Ludwig in terming this type of dialogue 'polyphonic dialogue', which allows Cassirer's insistence on a plurality of cultural forms to be extended to a plurality of discourses in society and the novel.
Bakhtin's poet is a hegemonic intellectual whose language relates in an authoritative fashion to the discourse of the masses, while the novelist aims to break and indeed reverse that hegemonic relationship.
Bakhtin agreed with Lukács that the novel represented the 'essence of the age' and that irony constituted a central factor of the novelistic method, but rejected the latter's assertion that unless the novel revealed the thread of rationality running through a seemingly anarchic world, i.e.
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