1st Edition
Towards a New Material Aesthetics Bakhtin, Genre and the Fates of Literary Theory
By Alastair Renfrew
Copyright 2006
218 Pages
by
Routledge
200 Pages
by
Routledge
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Set in the context of the various materialist approaches to literary aesthetics that emerged in the twentieth century, Renfrew's study presents a new synthesis of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and his circle, Russian Formalism, and elements of the 'official' ideology of the early Soviet period. The book's central aim in offering such a synthesis is to negotiate the poles of postmodernist subjectivism and 'traditional' materialism around which much current literary and critical theory has stagnated, and, as the title suggests, to point the way towards a newly conceived material basis for textual and literary analysis.
Introduction: Between the Lines in the Soviet 1920s 1 The Problem of Material 2 Bakhtin and Dostoevsky beyond Formalism 3 The Problem of Material and the Problem of Genre 4 Representation and the Two Lines of Genre Theory in Bakhtin 5 A Neo-Idealist Theory of Genre 6 Speech Genres and Literary Genres, Conclusion: The Fates of Literary Theory
Biography
Renfrew, Alastair