Bakhtin… you really are that girl! This collection of essays is dense but so so brilliant—laying out Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and vision for what the form can offer (spoiler: an expansive, diverse accounting for different people, cultures, classes, and societies, through language). I heard a great lecture on the third essay, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” and wanted to learn more about how the novel weaves time and space together to produce an image of the world, and this essay really opened my mind to what great literature can do.

One of my favorites. This book is the foundational text for my thesis.

Bakhtiiin, you were slow going. Started reading this one back in ye olde 2013, for my first ever European Classical Literatures class, finished it finally after the odious course involving everyone's mutual friends Messrs Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. /Finally/ through with this golden gem of a book in early 2016. This book ought to be made required reading for the English Honours course imo. But more on that later.

Bakhtin has some good things to say, but his writing style is difficult with way too many parenthetical notations that make it hard to keep focused on the flow of information as well as exaggerated circular writing. Very repetitive. Not to mention, the editing of the text itself is poorly done.

%200 sure Bakhtin would be another Derrida if he were French instead of a Russian who was stuck in 1920s Soviet Union only to be discovered years, years later. Both my dudes so we cool.

Heteroglossia and chronotopes—I return again and again to Bakhtin.

I struggled so much with this text. I wanted to finish it but I just couldn’t. There are so many allusions to rare texts that no one has ever read, descriptions of those texts that go on for pages, in order to make a point or demonstrate an idea Bakhtin is trying to get across. There are words that are so complex or specific to those who study literature professionally that your typical reader would not readily know. There are also tons of terms that Bakhtin has coined himself that don’t have adequate definitions in the essays. There is also quite a bit of repetition which could be attributed to the translation from Russian to English or to the writing style of Bakhtin’s time. I found the first two essays to be more readable than the other two. He has some interesting ideas, but the method in which he attempts to convey them are convoluted and hurt my head.