Antiquitopia

One of Bakhtin's most distinctive features as a thinker is the notion of "dialogism," and yet, he would point out, this is not quite right, for speech is more like "trialogism" between the speaker, the listener, and those who have used these speech patterns before, that have formed the ways of speaking: The word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the "soul" of the speaker and does not belong only to him. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all there are no words that belong to no one). The word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio). It is performed outside the author, and it cannot be introjected into the author. (M.M. Bakht...

I have been tagged by Daniel and Tonya at Hebrew and Greek Reader . In this meme, I will give the five books or authors who have shaped my thought the most, whether I like them or not, whether through agreement or opposition, etc. And they can be enduringly or immediately influential. This meme started not too long ago with Ken Brown at COrthodoxy . So, here are my five. For those who read my blog regularly, there probably will not be too many surprises. 1. M.M. Bakhtin . Most immediately, this Russian has profoundly influenced not only the way I approach my work--although he does that--but how I view day-to-day interactions. I was introduced to his thought through his essay on the "Chronotope" in the collected volume, The Dialogic Imagination . I use the Chronotope extensively in my dissertation. Since then, I have branched out to his other works and others' use of him. But even his concepts of the "utterance" from simple day-to-day speech-units to co...

I rarely quote scholarship. Even in my written work, I give pride of place to ancient sources with scholarship relegated to footnotes. Nonetheless, I have been reading the volume of Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies , edited by Roland Boer of Stalin's Moustache fame. Bakhtin, by the way, is my favorite (at the moment) literary non-theorist (I am always fascinated by how the most productive "theorists" claim to be anti-theory as Bakhtin himself claims). I primarily activate his "chronotope" in my current writing, yet his concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony, dialogism, etc., highly inform my approach even if I do not use the lingo. The final chapter in the aforementioned volume is the response to the essays of the Bakhtin and Bible SBL group by Vernon Robbins (famous for his "sociorhetorical criticism), and some of his final words on the chronotope (a dialogized chronotope), I thought worthy of blog quotation: Perhaps...the idea of a new Mos...

The idea lives not in one person's isolated individual consciousness--if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others . Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else's voice, that is, in someone else's consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives. (M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics ; trans. Caryl Emerson; italics original)