Bakhtin

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

I learned in the fall '93 that Michael Holquist was coming in
the spring to a weeklong Nordic Comp Lit seminar taking place
in a nunnery in Djursland, Denmark... To get there, I started
writing that (post-)Bakhtinesque piece. (Mike H loves Pynchon
by the way.) The piece was also a critique of the late Allon
White's essay, "Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction."
(In Gloversmith, Frank (ed.): The Theory of Reading. Brighton:
Harvester Press Ltd. 123-146.) In White's view, Pynchon holds
a frozen middle position between the positive carnivalism of
James Joyce and negative carnivalism of Malcolm Lowry. I tried
to show that the issue is much more complicated than that, esp.
when it comes to Joyce.

Of course Brian McHale, too, draws on Bakhtin in chapters like
"Heteroglossia" and "Carnival" in _Postmodernist Fiction_.


Heikki