Doug and anyone else interested in Bakhtin
I think Bakhtin does get it right as well since this closer and slower
reading of Dialogic Imagination. What I am noticing is all the asides
and footnotes that remove actual poetry from the concept of monologic
poetics. For example, Rimbaud gets put on the side of novelistic and it
would seem from this so would vitalist poetry and again perhaps all
modernist poetry goes to the side of novelistic? "Monologic poetics"
becomes empty of content and the subject goes missing. I am beginning to
get a sense that what Bakhtin is critically after is a formal poetics
based on Hegel's system which indicates the Russian Formalists and
Sassure's (sp?)linguistic system as an Hegelian system. (I could make
citations from Hegel here, even.)
Removing poetry and novels from this sort of formal poetic system which
claims that it is finally up to philosophy to think on behalf of poetry
and novels returns thought to poetry and novels. It is also interesting
that the poetry that is put on the side of novelistic does so by the
force of poetry itself. This says that it is not up to philosophy to
expel the poets but the poets do it. Bakhtin would then be very much a
modernist thinker in this regard so it would seem.
I often think that when fiction writers look at the differences between
prose and poetry they are asking a practical question on how to write.
But this goes in a different direction also with vitalist poetics as not
some sort of spontaneous thing of air wandering lonely as a cloud but as
force which demands thought which is a modernist question. As to
Bahktin's asides above, it becomes also more obvious how Gary Saul
Morson got to the concept of side shadowing as narrative and freedom.
anyways, hope this makes sense, I feel a little sleepy and unwell but
will send it anyways...
On Thu, 2006-11-30 at 10:04 -0700, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Chris
>
> I liked your snap too. And I was planning on responding to your earlier
> mention of Bakhtin, as I too have thought that he managed to dismiss
> poetry (or lyric poetry as such) too easily as monologic. My argument
> would be, however, that he has some of this right: the novel brought
> dialogicism into a kind of new space, & then various poets, in their
> attempts to get beyond the ego-dominance of lyric found ways to bring
> it back into poetry. I once said it this way:
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