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The Self, the Novel and History. On the Limits of Bakhtin's Historical Poetics
Author(s) -
Biti Vladimir
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2011.01018.x
Subject(s) - poetics , argument (complex analysis) , colonialism , order (exchange) , literature , philosophy , epistemology , devaluation , history , art , linguistics , poetry , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology , finance , currency , economics
This article considers Bakhtin's historical poetics as a particularly enthusiastic representative of the European evolutionary paradigm with a series of disquieting (post‐)colonial implications. It starts with a genealogy of several basic modernist categories like the self, the novel, history and historical poetics. In order to lay bare the underlying novelistic pattern of the modernist conception of history, it continues with a comparison between the philosophical and sociological theories of the novel of Bakhtin and Luhmann respectively. Both of them connect the advancement of the self with a devaluation of the other, which is a typically colonial pattern according to the argument in the conclusion of the paper.