Chapter 3 - Context

Summary

Bakhtin's work continually develops, but on the basis of a few enduring concerns. The first of these is the belief that the fate of Europe depends on a new conception of historical life as an 'ethical reality', which is structured by the prospect of a messianic future. The second is the claim that this ethical reality depends on a crucial distinction between I and other. Finally, Bakhtin believes that this relationship is embodied in the form of literary works and their language, which transforms our everyday experience of the world into language and narrative that embodies 'historical becoming', the form history takes when it is ethical. Bakhtin's linguistic turn in the late 1920s focuses on how a new novelistic style infuses social language with this historical sense: double-voiced discourse recreates language as what Bakhtin calls 'social heteroglossia', which teems with historical becoming. But double-voiced discourse is always reliant on new kinds of narrative form, which probe and shape the'languages' of the novel. Bakhtin's work from the late 1930s onwards is a sustaned effort to describe and specify the narrative forms that convey historical becoming.