Reviews for Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

The average rating for Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-10-16 00:00:00 Stephen Simmons Phew... I think I burned a billion brain cells to gain a billion brain cells. This is the toughest book on literature I ever read. Bakhtin is definitely a philosopher first and then a literary critic. And like all philosophical arguments, one has to persevere through the plateau of abstractness and all the asides an argument can tangent off to, before returning to the conclusion of a 'point.' There is much to admire in Bakhtin's passion and interpretation of Dostoevsky's poetics. He certainly has a gift for categorizing, analyzing and qualifying the types and modes of dialogue and rhetoric of Dostoevsky's characters. Much of the analysis is based on the protagonists from the shorter works: The Double, The Gambler, Notes from the Underground etc.; of course, when necessary, mentions from the novels are also cited. This made the book more accessible because the material itself is remarkably dense at times, so confining it to a handful of texts really helped me to stay focused on the explanations. It definitely helps to read the novellas mentioned above and the short stories before reading this treatise. What fascinated me the most was how Bakhtin formalized - academically and philosophically - the style of speech and thought in Dostoevsky's characters. As a reader of Dostoevsky, I know exactly what Bakhtin is getting at. However, other than in academics or as he eloquently defines it: metalinguistics, I can't imagine how much relevance such formalism can be to the general Dostoevsky reader. That is not to say that I didn't gain a new appreciation for the genius of Dostoevsky (ad infinitum), and a richer understanding of how his style carries on throughout his writings and the powerful effect it has in establishing the polyphonic voice. But so much technical insight may also spoil the sheer joy of reading Dostoevsky and discovering his magic. At least don't read this book until you've read enough Dostoevsky (if even possible) for pleasure first.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-03-29 00:00:00 Andrew Lemlyn Bookmarks have essentially become meaningless as I now have one in just about every page. Time to buy a second copy just to mark-up! Bakhtin and Dostoevsky. Really, need I say more?After a few years away I'm working through all my Bakhtin books again. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics is full of Bakhtin's big ideas: his basic theory of the polyphonic novel, the reasoning for why Doestoevsky is its chief practicioner, but also poetics and ideology in general and what we now refer to as Bakhtinian topics: dialogism vs. monologism, chronotopes, carnivalesque, heteroglossia, and so on. The book is less systematic and structured than it might seem at first glance. A bit of a mess actually. But, in my view, and echoing the work itself, that mess is also a big part of its allure: ideas running amok are more ripe for assimilation and appropriation than a monologic system that is assembled brick by brick. As Wayne C. Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction) eventually concedes in his argumentative introduction: "In any case, I can think of no critic in recent years...who more effectively performs that essential task of all criticism: prodding readers to think again about critical standards as applied to the various canons and anti-canons those standards lead to." [xxvii] So, engage.