RE: "The Self, the Novel and History. On the Limits of Bakhtin’s Historical Poetics" by Vladimir Biti

Ah ha! I new, probably interesting article based on Bakhtin’s theories. I’ll have to check out the full text when it’s available for free.

The Self, the Novel and History. On the Limits of Bakhtin’s Historical Poetics

  1. Vladimir Biti

 

Article first published online: 12 JUL 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2011.01018.x

Keywords:

  • self

;

  • novel;
  • history;
  • historical poetics;
  • post-colonial theory

 

 

This article considers Bakhtin’s historical poetics as a particularly enthusiastic representative of the European evolutionary paradigm with a series of disquieting (post-)colonial implications. It starts with a genealogy of several basic modernist categories like the self, the novel, history and historical poetics. In order to lay bare the underlying novelistic pattern of the modernist conception of history, it continues with a comparison between the philosophical and sociological theories of the novel of Bakhtin and Luhmann respectively. Both of them connect the advancement of the self with a devaluation of the other, which is a typically colonial pattern according to the argument in the conclusion of the paper.

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