Bakhtin and Cultural Theory by Ken Hirschkop; David ShepherdReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), pp. 745-746Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4210464 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 13:48

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic andEast European Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.152 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 13:48:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 745

how the Russian writer turned his life experience to advantage as the basis for his lyrical productivity. The author's familiarity with Khodasevich, his ability to collate and construe his material, and his dedicated attempt to rehabilitate a comparatively neglected poet of Russia's richest literary period are together enough to guarantee that the difficult balancing act of structural analysis is performed without a tumble.

Department of Literature LEON BURNETT University ofEssex

Hirschkop, Ken and Shepherd, David (eds). Bakhtin and Cultural Theory. Man- chester University Press, Manchester and New York i989. ix + 224 pp. Tables. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. Price ?29.95; ?8.95 (paperback).

ON the second page of Ken Hirschkop's introduction to this collection of eight essays there is a neat statement of the paradox of Bakhtin's national origins: 'It would be a great, although not extraordinary, irony if the most interesting theorisation of the politics of national languages came from a country which was never a bourgeois nation-state, was overwhelmingly illiterate, and lacked the kind of mass culture typical of the industrial West' (p. 2). A parallel and perhaps even more striking irony is the reluctance of those concerned with the national specificity of Russian culture to absorb the more radical aspects of Bakhtin. Most of the participants in this volume are specialists in English; important concerns are the post-colonial status of the English language and British politics, with special reference to Ireland and Irish writing. There is nothing 'provincial' in the choice of writers under consideration (they include Gertrude Stein, JamesJoyce, Medbh McGuckian andJean-Paul Sartre). But Milan Kundera, who is the subject of an uncharacteristically respectful concluding feuilleton by Terry Eagleton, is the only writer born east of Vienna to figure.

Slavists, however, will find the book both directly and indirectly helpful. It at many points illuminates the 'discernible similarities between ... Soviet and Western notions of tradition and national cultural heritage' (Shepherd, p. Ioi). It challenges traditional approaches to Bakhtin, such as intellectual history/biography (as in Holquist and Clark's Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, Massachusetts, I984) and diluted neo-formalism (as espoused in Caryl Emerson's recent survey of Bakhtinian studies; see Slavonic and East European Journal, I988, 4, pp. 503-26, which assured the timorous that Bakhtin's work was not an assault on the idea of cultural authority). As one might expect, prominence is given to theorization of carnival discourse, which it is self- evidently difficult to simplify and reduce. But the apparently more comfort- able and assimilable 'heteroglossia' and 'dialogism' are also linked to a greater political and socio-economic arena: as Ken Hirschkop's excellent introduction stresses, Bakhtin's theorization of these concepts indicates a dynamic process, moving 'towards a conception of democracy as a collective learning process, dependent on cognition as much as open expression' (p. 3 ).

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.152 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 13:48:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

746 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

If one of the volume's effects is to blow the whistle on critical practice to date, another is to act as a positive stimulant to new ways of thinking. The contributions by Graham Pechey and Tony Crowley, with their emphasis on colonial and neo-colonial languages, suggest paths by which Russian language's prohibitions on itself might be analysed. Clair Wills's article on carnival and hysteria presents a historically informed discussion of hysterical discourse which avoids the dangers of naively celebrating the irrational whilst giving some cogent suggestions for modelling the difference of women's writing. And intellectual command does not exclude sensitivity to academic realities: David Shepherd concludes his piece with an invigorating statement of how Bakhtin might be used, given the practical exigencies of a student with a course book, to aid working 'from the inside out', and to stress 'the untenability, celebrated time and again by Bakhtin, of a too stark opposition of "inside" and "outside", "text" and "context", so often initially challenged but ultimately reinstated by other theorists of reading' (p. 105).

The book's appeal to a wide range of readers is ensured by the lively (if demanding) style in which the contributions are written, and by the high standards of the editing. Essays are fully and carefully documented, a glossary of English versions of Bakhtin's terms is provided, and there are a helpful annotated bibliography and an excellent index. Christ Church CATRIONA KELLY Oxford

Szarycz, Ireneusz. Poetics of Valentin Kataev's Prose of the I96os and I970s. American University Studies, series xii, vol. 5. Peter Lang, New York, I 989. I 93 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.95.

VALENTIN KATAEV died in April I986. The reader of Ireneusz Szarycz's monograph (published in I989!) learns this fact only from a footnote appended to a passage in which Szarycz seeks to justify his decision not to discuss the works of the I 98os on the grounds that at the time of writing Kataev was still alive and might produce a new book. Clearly there was an unacceptably long delay between the writing of this book and its publication. This is merely one of the many flaws and limitations which severely restrict the usefulness of Szarycz's work.

In the introduction the author indicates that his method will be largely 'structural', supplemented on occasion by 'the phenomenological methods of interpretation' (p. I5). The emphasis is, indeed, on Kataev's narrative strategies, and in Chapters II and III there are some interesting comments on point of view, time and space; but in a work devoted to only two of the six-and-a-half decades of Kataev's creative life a much more detailed and rigorous treatment might have been expected. A major defect is the failure to comment at any length on the hundreds of unattributed quotations and other cultural references which form an integral part (in an almost Nabokovian fashion) of the poetics of Kataev's later works. It is disturbing to note, too, that in the first chapter, devoted to Malen'kaia zheleznaia dver' v stene, some of the wording is uncomfortably close to that in previous English-language works on Kataev.

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.152 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 13:48:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions