Papers by Sergeiy Sandler
In: Understanding Bakhtin. Understanding Modernism, edited by Philippe Birgy, 287–288. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024
An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
In: Understanding Bakhtin. Understanding Modernism, edited by Philippe Birgy, 285–286. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024
An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
In: Understanding Bakhtin. Understanding Modernism, edited by Philippe Birgy, 275–276. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024
An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
In: Understanding Bakhtin. Understanding Modernism, edited by Philippe Birgy, 265–267. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024
An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
In: Understanding Bakhtin. Understanding Modernism, edited by Philippe Birgy, 261–262. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024
An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
In: Understanding Bakhtin. Understanding Modernism, edited by Philippe Birgy, 257–258. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024
An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
[Note: Due to a misunderstanding in the editing proces... more An entry in a glossary of Bakhtin's terms.
[Note: Due to a misunderstanding in the editing process, the title of the entry is not the one intended. The intended title was "Event (sobytie)"]
A brief introduction to a glossary of Mikhail Bakhtin's terms
[Note: This is the proofs version.... more A brief introduction to a glossary of Mikhail Bakhtin's terms
[Note: This is the proofs version. The title of the piece as published is "Introduction to the Glossary"]
In a way, late Bakhtin is the Bakhtin that we all know and love. Bakhtin wrote few of his works e... more In a way, late Bakhtin is the Bakhtin that we all know and love. Bakhtin wrote few of his works entirely in the last twenty-or-so years of his life, but throughout these years he has worked a lot on preparing his earlier writings for publication. As a result, practically every text that has been published between his emergence from obscurity in the early 1960s to his death in 1975, and even shortly afterwards, has undergone at least some level of revision in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of these revisions were more substantial than others, but even where the revisions were minor, they were often strategic. Bakhtin did a lot to alter the framing of his earlier works and modify the accents of particular passages so as to make the published texts relevant to his newly found audience. For Bakhtin’s readers in the West, the resulting effect has been even more pronounced, as practically all the major texts by Bakhtin published in translation were based on the revised Russian manuscripts. Thus, English readers only got their first taste of early Bakhtin in 1990, by which time the main contours of Bakhtin’s reception have mostly solidified; the reception of Bakhtin’s earlier writings in English-language scholarship did not begin in earnest until the 2010s.
So, up to this day, we mostly read all of Bakhtin through the lens of late Bakhtin. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the centrality of the concept of dialogue in the standard interpretation of Bakhtin’s thought as a whole, together with a few related notions, such as major (or “great”) time. These are accents that are typical of Bakhtin’s late period.
Now, I do not want to suggest that this reading of all of Bakhtin through late Bakhtin is mistaken; far from it. Bakhtin himself clearly thought there was some unity to his thought in different periods, and his own interpretation of this unity in his later years is surely a good place to start understanding what he had to say. However, in the process we do miss a lot of historical context, and with it also a lot of philosophical depth. Yes, dialogue, for instance, is a very central notion for Bakhtin, but we usually only see in that metaphor some layers of Bakhtin’s thought, while remaining oblivious to others. It is this historical context and philosophical depth that my paper aims to start recovering.
In this paper, I will offer a reading of late Bakhtin through the lens of earlier Bakhtin, tell a story of how Bakhtin’s late philosophy emerged, in correct chronological order, from the earlier phases of his intellectual development. This emergence, as we shall see, also involves many modernist (especially existentialist) themes. My gateway for this exploration will be a concept that, to the best of my knowledge, received no attention from Bakhtin scholars to date, despite it being a very central concept in Bakhtin’s middle and late periods (perhaps partly due to the fact it has been inconsistently rendered into English). The concept in question is smena (which I translate as “succession”). It is significant in that it appears both in Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and in his later linguistic works. It bridges those two realms of his thought in not quite obvious ways, and it allows drawing links and connections to other stages in Bakhtin’s work in a very perspicuous way.
At the end of this exploration of the notion of succession, we will be coming back to Bakhtin’s metaphor of dialogue to find it has been enriched with new tones (including some unexpectedly dark ones) that we were not aware of earlier, tying together many loose threads in our understanding of the unity of Bakhtin’s thought across different periods.
Boris Groys' article, " Between Stalin and Dionysos " , offers a provocative reading of Mikhail B... more Boris Groys' article, " Between Stalin and Dionysos " , offers a provocative reading of Mikhail Bakhtin's works, and especially of his notion of carnival, as an " aesthetic justification " of totalitarianism. In this paper I look at that article's weaknesses (as an actual interpretation of Bakhtin) and strengths (in the form of problems in Bakhtin scholarship it helped pose), and respond to it with a more detailed account of the place carnival assumes within Bakhtin's overall philosophical conception and its development over time.
As the canonical form of language use, face-to-face conversation, characterized by recurring pers... more As the canonical form of language use, face-to-face conversation, characterized by recurring perspective shift, also provides a central conceptual frame for structuring monologues and written texts. We hypothesize that such conversation-based structures are especially widespread in texts and languages that stand close to the oral roots of human culture. To substantiate this claim, we study an ancient and extremely influential text, the Hebrew bible, which shows a highly conversational structure throughout. We discuss such frequent structures as the presentation of non-reported speech in order to introduce intentions, hopes, motives, or states of affairs. Special emphasis is laid on the complementizer לאמר (lemor), grammaticalized from a speaking verb . This complementizer introduces the reason or significance of an action, presented through direct speech. We hope to advance the view that language and discourse are inherently conversational and thus viewpointed in nature.
![Research paper thumbnail of Тема карнавала в контексте философии M. М. Бахтина [The Place of Carnival in the Context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Philosophy]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/52017706/thumbnails/1.jpg)
The role that Mikhail Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais, and the carnival theme more generally, plays in... more The role that Mikhail Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais, and the carnival theme more generally, plays in Bakhtin’s philosophy is a perennial concern in Bakhtin studies. Indeed, how would one reconcile such ideas as the carnival crowd, the unclear boundaries of the human body in grotesque imagery, or the notion of a collective ancestral body, with Bakhtin’s personalism, his emphasis on the impossibility of merging self and other into one? However, Bakhtin himself did not find these notions to be incompatible. We find them not only separately, in works from different periods, but also adjacently, for example in the 2nd edition of his book on Dostoevsky. In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct the philosophical context, in which carnival appears in Bakhtin’s work and to place carnival within the development of Bakhtin’s aesthetics. I follow the process in which Bakhtin’s aesthetics and theory of the novel developed from an early focus on the human image examined from another’s point of view, to the carnivalesque image, dominated by the perspective of the I-for-myself. At the heart of this process stands Bakhtin’s study of how the image of a free and creative individual has been forged in world literature. When we compare the aesthetic views and evaluations espoused by Bakhtin in different periods, we sometimes find sharp reversals in his position. Nevertheless, these reversals are part of a continuous process of development in what can rightly be seen as essentially the same philosophical conception that informs Bakhtin’s work in all periods.
Место книги о Рабле, и вообще карнавальной темы, в философии М. М. Бахтина — одна из постоянных проблем бахтинистики. Действительно, как совмещаются такие темы, как толпа на карнавальной площади, размытые контуры индивидуального тела в гротескном образе, идея родового тела, с персонализмом Бахтина, с его подчёркиванием неслиянности я и другого? Но сам Бахтин не считал эти идеи несовместимыми. Мы находим их не только порознь, на страницах трудов разных периодов его творчества, но и вместе, например, во второй редакции книги Бахтина о Достоевском. Статья содержит попытку восстановить философский контекст, в котором возникает карнавальная тема у Бахтина и поставить карнавал на свое место в истории развития бахтинской эстетики словесного творчества. Реконструируется процесс развития эстетики и теории романа М. М. Бахтина от образа человека, видимого сугубо с позиции другого, в незаконченном трактате «Автор и герой в эстетической деятельности» к карнавальному образу, где доминирует точка зрения я-для-себя. В центре этого процесса стоит проблема создания образа свободного и творящего человека в мировой литературе. Сравнивая эстетические позиции и оценки М. М. Бахтина в работах разных лет, мы находим в них иногда резкие повороты и изменения. Но несмотря на эти повороты и изменения в бахтинской эстетике, можно все-же говорить о развитии единой базисной общефилософской концепции у М. М. Бахтина, от самых ранних до самых поздних его трудов.
Works of fiction have characters, who perform actions, which make up the plot of the story. In th... more Works of fiction have characters, who perform actions, which make up the plot of the story. In this chapter, following some recent work in cognitive linguistics, I develop a tentative qualitative analytical framework for using the categories of action, character, and plot to analyze the meaning of ordinary language utterances. I propose a preliminary list of action levels, character types, and plot functions, which can be used in analyzing discourse using this framework, and apply this apparatus to the analysis of two conversation transcripts. Examining ordinary talk in the terms proposed here helps substantiate a radically enactivist and dialogic conception of linguistic meaning by extending an action-based account of the meaning of full linguistic utterances to also cover utterances’ content.
Bakhtin and his circle
Daphna Erdinast Vulcan and Sergeiy Sandler. 2015. "Bakhtin and his circle". In Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere (eds.), Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy (pp. 23–40). London: Routledge.
The chapter provides a broad overview of the historical context and the development of the “Bakht... more The chapter provides a broad overview of the historical context and the development of the “Bakhtin circle”—a group of young intellectuals associated with the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin in the years 1918–1930. The particular circumstances and character of this intellectual phenomenon problematize the application of the term “circle” to the group. The authors respond to this challenge by tracing the lines leading from Bakhtin’s early phenomenological work—which centered on ethics and represented a break with then-dominant neo-Kantian philosophy—to the linguistic work of Voloshinov, one of Bakhtin's closest associates, in the late 1920s.
Forthcoming in: Esther Pascual and Sergeiy Sandler (eds), The conversation frame: Forms and functions of fictive interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
One may distinguish between three broad conceptions of linguistic meaning. One conception, which ... more One may distinguish between three broad conceptions of linguistic meaning. One conception, which I will call “logical”, views meaning as given in reference (for words) and truth (for sentences). Another conception, the “monological” one, seeks meaning in the cognitive capacities of the single mind. A third, “dialogical”, conception attributes meaning to interaction between individuals and personal perspectives. In this chapter I directly contrast how well these three approaches deal with the evidence brought forth by fictive interaction. I examine instances of fictive interaction and argue that intersubjectivity in these instances cannot be reduced to either referential-logical or individual-cognitive semantic notions. It follows that intersubjectivity must belong to the essence of linguistic meaning.
Language Under Discussion, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 30–33
In his paper “Small Model Languages as Tools for Reflection”, Paul Rastall proposes using deliber... more In his paper “Small Model Languages as Tools for Reflection”, Paul Rastall proposes using deliberately oversimplified and artificial model languages, making no grand claims for absolute truth, as heuristic and didactic tools in linguistic inquiry. While I find this approach both useful and commendable, I argue (echoing similar warnings in Wittgenstein’s late work) that such models can not only expand our horizons in thinking about language, but also limit them.
Language Under Discussion, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (2013), pp. 30–33, 2013
In his paper “Small Model Languages as Tools for Reflection”, Paul Rastall proposes using deliber... more In his paper “Small Model Languages as Tools for Reflection”, Paul Rastall proposes using deliberately oversimplified and artificial model languages, making no grand claims for absolute truth, as heuristic and didactic tools in linguistic inquiry. While I find this approach both useful and commendable, I argue (echoing similar warnings in Wittgenstein’s late work) that such models can not only expand our horizons in thinking about language, but also limit them.
Søren Kierkegaard’s influence on the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin has received relatively little at... more Søren Kierkegaard’s influence on the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin has received relatively little attention from Bakhtin scholars (and hardly any attention from Bakhtin scholars in the English-speaking world). Yet, as I argue in this paper, Kierkegaard was among the most important formative influences on Bakhtin's work. This influence is most evident in Bakhtin's early ethical philosophy, but remains highly relevant in later periods. Reading Bakhtin as a follower and developer of Kierkegaard's fundamental philosophical insights provides us with a key to the unity of Bakhtin's thought.
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Papers by Sergeiy Sandler
[Note: Due to a misunderstanding in the editing process, the title of the entry is not the one intended. The intended title was "Event (sobytie)"]
[Note: This is the proofs version. The title of the piece as published is "Introduction to the Glossary"]
So, up to this day, we mostly read all of Bakhtin through the lens of late Bakhtin. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the centrality of the concept of dialogue in the standard interpretation of Bakhtin’s thought as a whole, together with a few related notions, such as major (or “great”) time. These are accents that are typical of Bakhtin’s late period.
Now, I do not want to suggest that this reading of all of Bakhtin through late Bakhtin is mistaken; far from it. Bakhtin himself clearly thought there was some unity to his thought in different periods, and his own interpretation of this unity in his later years is surely a good place to start understanding what he had to say. However, in the process we do miss a lot of historical context, and with it also a lot of philosophical depth. Yes, dialogue, for instance, is a very central notion for Bakhtin, but we usually only see in that metaphor some layers of Bakhtin’s thought, while remaining oblivious to others. It is this historical context and philosophical depth that my paper aims to start recovering.
In this paper, I will offer a reading of late Bakhtin through the lens of earlier Bakhtin, tell a story of how Bakhtin’s late philosophy emerged, in correct chronological order, from the earlier phases of his intellectual development. This emergence, as we shall see, also involves many modernist (especially existentialist) themes. My gateway for this exploration will be a concept that, to the best of my knowledge, received no attention from Bakhtin scholars to date, despite it being a very central concept in Bakhtin’s middle and late periods (perhaps partly due to the fact it has been inconsistently rendered into English). The concept in question is smena (which I translate as “succession”). It is significant in that it appears both in Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and in his later linguistic works. It bridges those two realms of his thought in not quite obvious ways, and it allows drawing links and connections to other stages in Bakhtin’s work in a very perspicuous way.
At the end of this exploration of the notion of succession, we will be coming back to Bakhtin’s metaphor of dialogue to find it has been enriched with new tones (including some unexpectedly dark ones) that we were not aware of earlier, tying together many loose threads in our understanding of the unity of Bakhtin’s thought across different periods.
Место книги о Рабле, и вообще карнавальной темы, в философии М. М. Бахтина — одна из постоянных проблем бахтинистики. Действительно, как совмещаются такие темы, как толпа на карнавальной площади, размытые контуры индивидуального тела в гротескном образе, идея родового тела, с персонализмом Бахтина, с его подчёркиванием неслиянности я и другого? Но сам Бахтин не считал эти идеи несовместимыми. Мы находим их не только порознь, на страницах трудов разных периодов его творчества, но и вместе, например, во второй редакции книги Бахтина о Достоевском. Статья содержит попытку восстановить философский контекст, в котором возникает карнавальная тема у Бахтина и поставить карнавал на свое место в истории развития бахтинской эстетики словесного творчества. Реконструируется процесс развития эстетики и теории романа М. М. Бахтина от образа человека, видимого сугубо с позиции другого, в незаконченном трактате «Автор и герой в эстетической деятельности» к карнавальному образу, где доминирует точка зрения я-для-себя. В центре этого процесса стоит проблема создания образа свободного и творящего человека в мировой литературе. Сравнивая эстетические позиции и оценки М. М. Бахтина в работах разных лет, мы находим в них иногда резкие повороты и изменения. Но несмотря на эти повороты и изменения в бахтинской эстетике, можно все-же говорить о развитии единой базисной общефилософской концепции у М. М. Бахтина, от самых ранних до самых поздних его трудов.