Michael F. Bernard-Donals / Michael FBernard-Donals
The language theory of Mikhail Bakhtin does not fall neatly under any single rubric--’dialogism, ’ ’Marxism, ’ ’prosaics, ’ ’authorship’--because the philosophic foundation of his writing rests ambivalently between phenomenology and Marxism. The theoretical tension of these positions creates philosophical impasses in Bakhtin’s work, which have been neglected or ignored partly because these impasses are themselves mirrored by the problems of antifoundationalist and materialist tendencies in literary scholarship.