Mikhail Bakhtin · Default Product

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Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concerns Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the relations among received notions of biography, unity, innovation, and the creative process. Unity—with respect not only to individuals but also to art, culture, and the world generally—is usually understood as conformity to an underlying structure or an overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that this idea of unity contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For if everything conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine development is reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of something that, in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhti

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