After Bakhtin

"If the 1960s was the decade of structuralism, and the 1970s the decade of deconstruction, then the 1980s have been dominated by the discovery and dissemination of Mikhail Bakhtin's work. Now widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin was silenced by political censorship and persecution for most of his life. In 'After Bakhtin' David Lodge sketches Bakhtin's extraordinary career, and explores the relevance of his ideas on the dialogic nature of language, on the typology of fictional discourses and on the carnivalesque - to…