Potentialities and Limitations of the Bakhtinian Approach in Literary Criticism

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most influential theorists of literary criticism in the twentieth century whose ideas, particularly in the field of novel criticism, have been widely embraced by scholars in literary studies worldwide. In Iran, however, the Bakhtinian approach is less known compared with other critical approaches such as mythological-archetypal criticism or psychoanalytical criticism. Bakhtin initially started his literary scholarship in association with the Russian Formalists, but gradually distanced himself from their viewpoints and established his own independent approach in criticism. The Russian Formalists believed the function of language in literary texts to be “defamiliarisation”. As such, they argued that figures of speech are tools that poets and writers use in order to make the literary use of language different from its non-literary usage. Bakhtin disagreed with the Formalists and argued that language also has social and discursive aspects that need to be taken into account so that the critic would be in a position to offer insights into the deeper, hidden layers of social behaviour. Therefore, unlike the Formalists who focused their attention on the rhetorical and formal aspects of literary works, Bakhtin tried to analyse literature as discourse. Highlighting the social aspects of the novel, he emphasizes that the critic’s central concern should be to investigate how language is used in the novel. In his view, language in the novel, in distinction to poetry, is marked by concreteness. Therefore, novelistic prose is always orientated towards concrete details, as it also is in journalistic as well as legal and political texts. This concrete orientation necessitates that linguistic usage in the novel be consistent with actual language use by social groups. Concentrating on the novel as an essentially polyphonic genre marked by heteroglossia, he put forward a theory about the carnivalesque in the novel.This essay aims to expound the Bakhtinian approach in literary criticism by focusing on the tripartite concepts of “polyphony”, “heteroglossia” and “carnival”. To do so, we first discuss Bakhtin’s ideas on the essential contrast between the language of poetry and the language of the novel and then move on to consider his viewpoints on the multiplicity of voices in the novel, linguistic reflection of social stratification in this genre, and its carnivalesque qualities. In order to clarify the theoretical aspects of the Bakhtinian approach, we complement our exposition of Bakhtin’s theory with critical readings of three sample texts of Persian literature, which include selected extracts from Ferowsi’s Shahnameh, a poem by Mehdi Akhvan Salles entitled “Sonnet No. 3”, and the novel Shazdeh Ehtejab by Hooshang Golshiri. In the conclusion to this essay, we offer our assessment of the potentialities as well as the limitations of Bakhtin’s theory in literary criticism in addition to drawing a perspective of the expansion and updating of this critical approach