Towards a new material aesthetics: Bakhtin, genre, and the fates of literary theory

Description

"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." Chapter Introduction -- Between the Lines in the Soviet 1920s / Alastair Renfrew -- chapter 1 The Problem of Material / Alastair Renfrew -- chapter 2 Bakhtin and Dostoevsky beyond Formalism / Alastair Renfrew -- chapter 3 The Problem of Material and the Problem of Genre / Alastair Renfrew -- chapter 4 Representation and the Two Lines of Genre Theory in Bakhtin / Alastair Renfrew -- chapter 5 A Neo-Idealist Theory of Genre / Alastair Renfrew -- chapter 6 Speech Genres and Literary Genres / Alastair Renfrew.