scholarly journals Dostoevsky's Poetics of Modern Freedom: Against Bakhtin's "Polyphonic" Moral Truth

Labyrinth ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-85
Author(s):  
Ava Wright
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Moral Truth ◽  
Polyphonic Model

In an influential treatise, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) asserts that the aim of Dostoevsky's distinctive poetics is to advance a revolutionary, "polyphonic" model of moral truth. In this paper, I argue that while Bakhtin correctly identifies essential features of Dostoevsky's poetics, these features are better understood as oriented toward meeting the free modern individual's need to test ultimate moral ends and concomitant virtues in order to determine their truth. An Aristotelian poetics intended to educate audiences only in how to be virtuous to achieve moral ends that are given by tradition will have different essential features than will a modern poetics whose purpose is to help individuals determine what the virtues are. It is this latter purpose, I argue, that drives Dostoevsky to create the new stylistic devices that Bakhtin observes in Dostoevsky's work, rather than the purpose of realizing a philosophically problematic "polyphonic" model of moral truth.

Mikhail Bakhtin

1995 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael F. Bernard-Donals
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin

The Alluring Nature of Children's Culture: Fairy Tales, the Carnival and the World Wide Web

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-184
Author(s):  
Željka Flegar
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Time Out ◽  
The Social ◽  
Children's Culture ◽  
Language And Ideology

This article discusses the implied ‘vulgarity’ and playfulness of children's literature within the broader concept of the carnivalesque as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1965) and further contextualised by John Stephens in Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction (1992). Carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales are examined by situating them within Cristina Bacchilega's contemporary construct of the ‘fairy-tale web’, focusing on the arenas of parody and intertextuality for the purpose of detecting crucial changes in children's culture in relation to the social construct and ideology of adulthood from the Golden Age of children's literature onward. The analysis is primarily concerned with Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes (1982) and J. K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2007/2008) as representative examples of the historically conditioned empowerment of the child consumer. Marked by ambivalent laughter, mockery and the degradation of ‘high culture’, the interrogative, subversive and ‘time out’ nature of the carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales reveals the striking allure of contemporary children's culture, which not only accommodates children's needs and preferences, but also is evidently desirable to everybody.

How Dialogical Are We Really? Insights Gleaned from Un-Dialogical Moments

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongjing Kang ◽  
Chigozirim Utah Sodeke
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Crucial Step ◽  
Research Reporting

This essay emphasizes the writing of dialogical research as a crucial step in the dialogical research process. Dialogical research accounts should not suppress the ongoing struggles that accompany a genuine desire to engage dialogically in research contexts. Thus, we advocate and model evocative retellings of these struggles. Questioning our own fieldwork based on the work of Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin, we highlight principles of dialogue that also serve as guidelines for dialogical research reporting: unfinalizability, engaging paradoxes, and creative (critical) transformation.

Romance e imagem em O fotógrafo, de Cristóvão Tezza

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cimara Valim De Melo
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Susan Sontag

O presente ensaio busca analisar o romance O fotógrafo, de Cristóvão Tezza, para dele extrair elementos comuns à romanesca contemporânea quanto ao modo como esta realiza a projeção imagética e plástica das relações eu/outro nos limites espaciais da criação literária. Para isso, a pesquisa tem como base os estudos de Mikhail Bakhtin sobre as relações entre atividade estética, imagem, espaço e personagem, além dos de Roland Barthes e Susan Sontag sobre o fotográfico e de Erving Goffmann sobre representação.

Dialogue as Generative Form of Positioning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hubert J. M Hermans
Keyword(s):  
Learning Process ◽  
Main Part ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
The Self ◽  
David Bohm ◽  
Self Talk ◽  
Central Elements

For the development of a democratic self, dialogical relationships between different people and between different positions in the self are paramount. After a review of studies on self-talk, the main part of this chapter is devoted to a comparison of the works of two classic thinkers on dialogue, Mikhail Bakhtin and David Bohm. A third theoretical perspective is depicted in which central elements of the two theorists are combined. This perspective centers around the concept of “generative dialogue” that, as a learning process, has the potential of innovation in the form of new and common meanings without total unification of the different positions. Elaborating on central features of generative dialogue, a distinction is made between consonant and dissonant dialogue, the latter of which is inevitable in a time of globalization and localization in which people are increasingly interdependent and, at the same time, faced with their apparent differences.

Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy

2001 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Caryl Emerson ◽  
Ken Hirschkop
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin

The Nature of Truth

1952 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28
Author(s):  
B. De Kretser
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Truth ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
The One

The consideration of this problem is important for at least two reasons. In many countries there are reports of an increasing decline in public morals and of growing dishonesty and corruption in the life of the body politic. This is taking place at a time when the established religious systems are being subjected to the pressure of pseudo-scientific secularism on the one hand and the claims of modern alternative faiths on the other. Clearly the two developments are interconnected. Yet, to judge from the burden of many public utterances of responsible leaders, including the now important and significant ‘Moral Re-armament’ Group, the close dependence of moral truth and the truth about the character of reality is not realised. Most people are content to mutter the usual platitudes—‘Honesty is the best policy’, ‘Do please try to be good and speak the truth’. But the problem of truth is more complicated than our naīve moralists would have us believe.

Moral Truth

Dialogue ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-452
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Truth ◽  
Truth Claims

Is worrying about whether moral judgments are true or false a philosophical waste of time? It can seem to be if moral truth claims are redundant on thejudgments they claim to be true. If to claim that the judgment “x is wrong” is true is simply to judge x wrong, anyone who is prepared to make judgments can consistently make truth claims. A concern for moral truth is then merely a concern for whether anything is right or wrong, not a separable concern for whether moral judgments are true or false.

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