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“... For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives, global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business ...”

“... Up until the late Fifties, Mikhail Bakhtin was completely unknown in his own country. Then a group of graduate students at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, who had come across the first version of his book on Dostoevsky (1929) and wondered about his fate, discovered to their astonishment that he was still alive and teaching at an obscure institute in the Russian provinces ...”

“... Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin agree on so little as theorists of literature that they must count as alternatives. To read one and then the other, preferably Jakobson first and then Bakhtin, as a sort of anti-Jakobson, is a literary theoretical education. Where Jakobson is dry, Bakhtin is convivial; where Jakobson is technocratic, Bakhtin is impulsive; where Jakobson is magisterial, Bakhtin is a groundling ...”

“... Kermode’s principle (theory that does not arise from and flow back into practice is suspect), Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson gives powerful positive evidence of its essential correctness. This is a careful and comprehensive account of the work of a sophisticated thinker who was thoroughly immersed in ...”

“... just as much about the place of Rabelais in the history of literature. To the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, it is obvious that Rabelais belongs to ‘the culture of folk humour’; to the French Marxist, Henri Lefebvre, he is the spokesman of the bourgeoisie; to other critics, from Northrop Frye to Dorothy Coleman, he is a humanist, reviving the ...”

“... inspect the contribution of a range of forceful male theorists – Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Mikhail Bakhtin – in a similarly sceptical light. Given her suspicion of the theoretical, her concentration on these figures looks incongruous. In fact, she demonstrates no wish for a wholesale renunciation of theoretical analysis, and her essays are ...”

“... But when he is dealing with original critics of real intellectual power like Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ernst Robert Curtius, Georg Lukacs, Viktor Shklovsky and Leo Spitzer, he offers trenchant and detailed critiques of their key concepts and methods, while also conveying a sense of their achievement. Auerbach’s Mimesis is a masterwork of ...”

“... of a particular text the bustling, workaday life of the common people. For Auerbach as for Mikhail Bakhtin, who was writing his classic work on Rabelais and realism at much the same time that Auerbach was holed up almost bereft of books in Istanbul, realism is in the broadest sense a matter of the vernacular. It is the artistic word for a ...”

“... also had books by Blanchot and Céline. She studied with Roland Barthes, introduced the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to the French, and became closely associated with the magazine Tel Quel. She met Philippe Sollers within months of her arrival and they were married in 1967. After two books on semiotics (1969-70), she published the influential Revolution in ...”

“... like Greenblatt, a number of contributors draw on contemporary social and cultural theory, from Mikhail Bakhtin and Roman Jakobson to Jacques Lacan and Georg Lukacs: given the concern with collective representations, it is surprising to find no reference to Emile Durkheim. However, other essays in the volume have little in common with Greenblatt’s ...”

“... nothing but Rebellious Warres inciting’ – Malcolm is so vehemently opposed to the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom nonsense writings such as those of Rabelais enacted an uprising of the low against the restraints of high culture (a view with which Taylor himself seems in the instance above to have concurred), that he is inclined to overlook the ...”

“... economy was very interesting for us. R.B.: From reading your book I gather that the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin had an influence on you? B.K.: Yes, he did. He died in the Seventies and no sooner was he dead than everybody began to study his writings and to appreciate his theses on the necessity for a dialogic structure in true art – that is to ...”

“... again it may not. There is some overlap between Shestov and a thinker who is now better-known, Mikhail Bakhtin; both celebrate forms of discourse that dispense with a fixed subject position and set opposing viewpoints in vigorous dialogical collision. The aim is to challenge the reader’s preconceptions – or, in MacDiarmid’s expressive Scots ...”

“... medieval period as rumbustious and festive, the Rabelaisian moment long afterwards developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. The doyen of the group in Scott’s lifetime was the book-collector and cultural historian Francis Douce. In his Illustrations of Shakespeare (1807), Douce traces many of Shakespeare’s sources and allusions to the late Middle Ages, and ...”

“... up in a sort of Shavian house-party consisting of Leopold Bloom, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nikolai Bakhtin (the brother of Mikhail), and a trooper called Molloy, all of whom just happen to fetch up in a lonely Connemara cottage. What follows is often highly amusing, since Eagleton is (as one had suspected) pretty good at the ...”