The ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin have received a great amount of scholarly interest both in his homeland and in the West, giving rise to a special discipline devoted to the study of the legacy of the Bakhtin Circle.
Despite the huge amount of material published on Bakhtin, the
appropriation of Bakhtin’s ideas has remained a rather controversial
issue, and thus, there are competing views, especially between Russian and Western scholars, on what Bakhtin’s project was. Furthermore, the
relevance of Bakhtin is not limited to ’Bakhtinology proper’, nor to
literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy, which are traditionally considered Bakhtin’s home ground. It has become trendy to apply
Bakhtin within other disciplines such as pedagogy, psychology, and
linguistics, to name just a few, and, in certain respects, there seem to be good grounds for talking about a ’Bakhtin industry’ which has created
’Bakhtins’ for different purposes.The diversity of views on ’what Bakhtin really meant’ ste
ms, at least partially, from the fact that our understanding of Bakhtin is
complicated by well-known problems associated with the publication and translation of his works both in Russia and in the West. However, in the contemporary context of Bakhtin studies the situation is radically
changing thanks to two projects dedicated to a complete scholarly edition of Bakhtin’s work. First, the publication of Bakhtin’s Collected Works has started in Russia, making available new and previously unpublished
material, and, second, Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield has launched a project that aims at an electronic edition of the works of the Bakhtin Circle in which the original Russian texts are complemented by their revised English translations. Hence, on the one hand, in the present situation there is clearly a need for a critical approach based on careful reading of source texts and also on the criticism of these sources. On the other hand, although a certain critical and analytical attitude towards Bakhtin’s texts is extremely important, there is no reason why the
understanding and evaluation of his own ideas in their own contexts
should be considered as the only legitimate form of Bakhtin studies.In addition to ’Bakhtinology proper’, the appropriation and
application of Bakhtin’s ideas in new dialogizing contexts is, we argue, a perfectly justified and fruitful approach which does not necessarily lead to the exploitation and misrepresentation of Bakhtin. On the contrary, the recon-textualisation of Bakhtinian metaphors – when it is not based on an overzealous appropriation of isolated concepts, but on the understanding of their role in the overall system of Bakhtin’s thinking – can, in fact, enrich their meaning potential by offering new insights regarding the
object of study. In some sense, we think, Bakhtin himself would certainly had appreciated this abundant posthumous response evoked by his
ideas, since, in the end, words always want to be heard.
The articles of this volume are based on papers delivered at the
seminar The Relevance of Bakhtin’s Ideas in an Interdisciplinary Context which took place at the University of Jyväskylä in May 1997. The aim of the book, as its title suggests, is to discuss the ideas of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle from an interdisciplinary perspective. We hope that the present book will contribute both to a critical approach to the texts of the Bakhtin Circle and also to the theoretical discussions within and between the disciplines represented by the contributors of this book.
The editors would like to express their sincere gratitude to
everyone who assisted in the preparation of this book. Particularly we would like to thank Kari Sajavaara, Minna-Riitta Luukka, and Sirpa
Leppänen for their critical comments on some of the articles, Carol Adlam for her thorough and expert answers to our numerous questions, Helena
Valtanen and Katja Mäntylä for language revision, Sinikka Lampinen for preparing the manuscript for print, and, of course, all the contributors.
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