Written by Tzvetan Todorov on the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin
Literary theory is an examination of the science of language. Bakhtin explicated the role of Intertextuality in his theory of the Dialogical Principle. He theorised that interpretation is responsive understanding. In the early 1920s two axes of literary criticism were current. The first was stylistic criticism. The critics belonging to this school gave prominence to individual expression in reading and interpretation of texts. The second school was that of structural criticism. These theorists based their discourse on the structure of language. They focused on the role of langue in their reading and interpretation of texts. In essence the structural linguists gave primacy to the abstract grammatical form at the expense of other aspects of language. Bakhtins theory was neither stylistic nor structural. He posited a method which lay between these two axes of literary theory. He used his description of the privileged object to forward his argument. For Bakhtin human utterance is the product of the interaction of langue and the context of utterance. Furthermore, context refers to history and belongs to the past because it exists before the individual and as such context belongs to history. Therefore, he continues, human utterance should become an object of inquiry; a new science named Translinguistics.
The theory of Bakhtin, with its focus on human utterance, displays the Intertextual dimension by noting that each utterance is a dialogue in context. Language is a product of human understanding and thus every utterance is a repetition of named objects and used words.
The following reading is based on my handwritten notes and therefore my reading.The reference will be posted in a new post,and will be a comprehensive syllabus dating back to my years a s a research scholar.
