Jamboree

John Sturrock

• Handbook of Russian Literature edited by Victor Terras
  Yale, 558 pp, £25.00, April 1985, ISBN 0 300 03155 6
• Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time by Roman Jakobson, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy
  Blackwell, 208 pp, £25.00, July 1985, ISBN 0 631 14262 2
• Historic Structures: The Prague School Project 1928-1946 by F.W. Galan
  Croom Helm, 250 pp, £22.50, May 1985, ISBN 0 7099 3816 0
• Mikhail Bakhtin by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist
  Harvard, 398 pp, £19.95, February 1985, ISBN 0 674 57416 8
• The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics by M.M. Bakhtin and P.M. Medvedev, translated by Albert Wehrle
  Harvard, 191 pp, £7.50, May 1985, ISBN 0 674 30921 9
• Dialogues between Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska translated by Christian Hubert
  Cambridge, 186 pp, £15.00, August 1983, ISBN 0 521 25113 3
• The Dialogical Principle by Tzvetan Todorov, translated by Wlad Godzich
  Manchester, 132 pp, £25.00, February 1985, ISBN 0 7190 1466 2
• Rabelais and his World by Mikhail Bakhtin, translated by Hélène Iswolsky
  Indiana, 484 pp, $29.50, August 1984, ISBN 0 253 20341 4

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. Jakobson’s theories are known about, because he came to the West to work on them; Bakhtin’s we are only now starting to learn about, because of the shocking obscurity in which they were kept in his lifetime.