Summary on Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics”

FR 511 Bakhtin (Day 1) Summary The subject of our October 29th lecture was Mikhail Bakhtin and his text Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics. To start the class, Dr. protect reminded us that Laura talked close to polyphony in her entry the week before, and that that was where we would start the lecture on Bakhtin. To help the class break-dance understand the concept of polyphony, we were shown a piece of music written by Bach No. 4 of 6 little preludes. In the piece, the full hand was singing something completely different than the left hand. There were in fact two completely different melo evanesces happening at the equal cadence.We were told that, in Ro opustic music, there is i central melody, and the former(a) instruments argon there solely to accompany it. Their job is to reinforce the melody. But with erstwhile(a) music, we see that it is possible to direct more than one melody at a time, sometimes even four or five. You stack take c atomic number 18 to one melody at time or both at once, etc. This example of polyphony in music is basically a metaphor for the way that Bakhtin unders in any cased Dostoevsky. In classical literature, the text is rule mainly by the instance of the narrator, and everything else simply reinforces what the narrator has to say.With Dostoevsky, this is not the case. That is the world-class all important(p) guide to ring in understanding Dostoevskys poetics. concord to Bakhtin (not Amy), Dostoevsky is the occasion of the first polyphonic novel. At this point Dr. Wall say that Dostoevsky is really provided a foil and that former(a) authors could be substituted (Diderot for example). Again, approach path back to the first main point in understanding Dostoevskys poetics (or Diderot, etc. ), one has to imagine a type of literature where the narrators voice is no longer all powerful and no longer dominates the complete text.Furthermore, Russian orthodox theology also had an influence on Bakhtin. In the same way t hat God created man to have justify will, the author creates the literary character to have his own free will. In fact, one of the great splits in Christianity is over the doctrine of free will. Some mean that whether or not you will enter heaven after you die is not determined by you, still rather by point or God, etc. On the other hand, there is the doctrine of free will which basically states that when God created man, he gave him the ability to be disobedient and to have his own free will, even if it destroys him.This is the same fancy as the literary character being free to disobey the author. The underground man is an example of the free will of the literary character. He contradicts everything, he says one and one makes three. From there, we talked about the importance of multiple voices in a novel. These other voices in ar just as significant as the narrator, and can even at times contradict what the narrator says. This is what Bakhtin calls the Copernican revolution . Evidently, Copernicus knew that the hide revolves around the sun.So what Bakhtin is saying is that the narrator is no longer the centre of the novel, just now that there can be multiple centres. The second important point to know in auberge to understand Dostoevskys poetics is the concept of dialogism. Dialogism refers to the idea that in every observation, there are other utterances that you may or may not bring out, except that you have to learn to learn to. To beautify this point, Dr. Wall started with the example of European languages such as German where you often use the second person to speak to yourself. An example is when Dr.Wall says, Great bm Anthony. Bakhtin says that when we speak, theres always a tu out there. Whether it is explicit or not, language is always a dialog. From there, we talked about how, for Bakhtin, language does not live on to anyone. The spoken communication we use to express ourselves are not our own, we are just one voice amongst the m illions that language is. When we learn a language, we learn it from other people. When you express yourself, you are expressing yourself in a language that you borrowed from person else. naturally there will be traces of that mortal else in what you say.It is life-or-death to remember that in your own desire to express yourself, there are other voices inhabiting your own voice. Not just the spoken language, but the whole idea of discourse. It is in the flow and use of language. When you teach a single utterance, you can sometimes here the other utterances that are hidden, or the traces that were there before. And when you speak, all of these voices are going on at the same time, like an orchestra. So in a polyphonic novel, underneath the words you read, you have to learn to listen to the other voices that are hidden.So concerning this idea of dialogism, Bakhtin is provoke in the interaction betwixt voices, but not in dialog itself. For this reason, he hates theatre and mel odic poetry. He believes that they cover up what is really happening underneath. Theatre for him is too explicit because the actor is given one specific role or one single voice to play. This takes away the resonance that you have in a polyphonic novel. Another important point is that, for Bakhtin, the coexistence of multiple languages is crucial for the birth of the modern novel.He grew up in Russia where about four languages were mouth in the same community, so he was very much interested in the phenomenon of periods of time where more than one language were spoken in the same community. After the break, we looked at specific examples from Bakhtins text. On rogue 197, he writes about the idea of hidden dialogicality. In other books he gives the example of a telephone conversation where you can altogether hear one half of what is being said. Even though you can only hear one person speaking, you have a pretty unsloped chance of reconstructing what the other person is saying.The re are an incredible amount of words out there, and the actual sound prevents you from hearing the invisible sounds. The second emergency for the birth of the modern novel according to Bakhtin is silent reading. The most important characteristic of polyphonic prose is that it is meant to be read silently. For Bakhtin, when you read out loud, you are obliged to choose only one voice. Therefore, the other voices get lost. He encourages you to read a passage multiple times in order to hear all of the voices that are present. Parody is also a blossom example for Bakhtin.You think you are hearing a single voice, but there are actually at least two the real and the parody. He says that that is what a great novel does all of the time, as argue to theatre that he believes is more of a dialog. Of course, he was not old(prenominal) with modern theatre where actors play multiple roles. On page 187, Bakhtin writes about direct referentially oriented discourse. He explains that sum for him (and Saussure as well) does not come from the referential relationships of what we say, but rather because other people have said it. In other words, everything we try to think about has already been said 15 times before.Then on page 195, we discussed the fact that when you hear a sound, it is physically not the same when you hear it alone as when you hear it with other sounds. It is the same thing with coulour. When you take it out of its context, it becomes artificial. Dr. Wall then gave the example of Obama versus Romney, and how they would twist the other persons words to have a different perspective. The same thing is happening in the literary text and in regular discourse as well. For example, when someone says the wall is such a beautiful shade of green someone else might respond beautiful shade of green? The meaning of the utterance changes because of the question, but you hear the first statement at the same time. We cerebrate the lecture with this idea of the importance of the notion of the utterance. This helps us to understand that tell utterances either adds or takes away from them. It is possible to repeat a word, but not an utterance. The repetition of madness for example, changes when you repeat it as an utterance (with the time period for example). The last thing mentioned was that, even with a machine meaning changes due to the simple fact that the utterance has been repeated. Joey Pihrag