I Contain Multitudes

Terry Eagleton

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World by Graham Pechey Buy this book

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. Most of the mouth-filling terms he coined – dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope, heteroglossia, multi-accentuality – have passed into the lexicon of contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to appropriate him for their own agendas. Is he a Marxist, neo-Kantian, religious humanist, discourse theorist, literary critic, cultural sociologist, ethical thinker, philosophical anthropologist, or all these things together?

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From the LRB letters page: [ 19 July 2007 ] Graham Pechey.

Terry Eagleton’s books include Literary Theory, After Theory and – this month – Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics.

I Contain Multitudes

Terry Eagleton

From the archive