Mikhail Bakhtin

Bakhtin treated language as inherently social and contested: every utterance is shot through with other voices, and the novel is the genre that makes this audible. His work has been taken up across linguistics, anthropology, and cultural studies.

¶Core ideas

• Dialogism: meaning is produced in the relation between speakers, not in a single utterance
• Heteroglossia: the layered presence of social languages within any single language
• Chronotope: time-space configurations through which genres organize narrative

¶Key works

• Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929)
• Rabelais and His World (1965)
• The Dialogic Imagination (1975)