Michail M. Bakhtin

Gender: Laughter, part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender, examines the significance of laughter in gender and sexuality studies. The volume presents laughter as an affective force that reverberates in and between bodies, shatters social hierarchies, and enables and reveals relations between and among people. Multiple interconnections between gender and laughter generate a number of pressing questions: How does laughter arise? How does laughter create community? How and whom does laughter exclude? What practices of inclusion and exclusion are effected through laughter, and what does this reveal about society at large? How can laughter function as a strategy of resistance? What does laughter subvert? What is the role of bodies, sense perception, and affect in generating laughter? How does laughter challenge and transform corporeal boundaries? What does laughter make palpable? What feelings does laughter generate and transform? The twenty-five chapters in this volume explore these questions and related concerns in five thematic parts: Gender and Genre; The Carnivalesque and the Grotesque; Tonalities of Laughter; Performance and Artifice; and Materialities. An introduction, numerous engaging illustrations, a glossary of key terms, and a comprehensive index provide additional context and assistance to students, instructors, and general readers. The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender presents an exceptional opportunity for many people, especially undergraduate students, to become more familiar with the usefulness and pleasure of "doing gender and sexuality studies." The introductory volume along with subsequent volumes on Animals, God, Laughter, Love, Matter, Nature, Space, Time, and War offer a conceptual approach that encourages a thoroughly cross-, trans-, and interdisciplinary exploration of so-called universal themes. A variety of sexually, racially, and gender-sensitive critical perspectives are employed to investigate foundational questions addressed by feminist scholars and scientists. Chapters in each volume are newly commissioned and hence based on fresh and topical research and debates from fields such as philosophy, anthropology, literature, art, music, social sciences, (old and new) media, history, science, religion, and others. Both individually and as a series, the handbooks constitute a resolutely interdisciplinary project in the sense given to the term by Roland Barthes: "In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a 'subject' (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one."

“Carnivalesque” is perhaps the best, if not the only way to describe what was going on at the Bab al-Saghir Cemetery that hot summer afternoon in 2008.  In front of the graves of the Prophet’s wives, Shi‘i pilgrims could buy Viagra, sex-enhancement creams, and massage oils.  Sexual mores were normally strictly guarded in Syria and medicines were usually available only at pharmacies.  Yet, there in one of the most historically and religiously significant cemeteries in Damascus, makeshift vendors sold an array of sex-related items.  In order to analyze this phenomenon, this article draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque.”  First, it provides a short background of Twelver Shi‘ism in Syria and explains how Shi‘i religious tourism encouraged the development of black markets.  Then, it examines how Shi‘i pilgrimage, which occurred all year around, but peaked during Muharram, fostered an attitude that liberated Shi‘is from prevalent social norms and emphasized “grotesque” imagery and practices, including blood, death, and sex.  In short, it follows Michael Taussig’s call for anthropologists to attend to the transgressive aspects of religious ritual.

This article proves that the philosophy of dialogue in its various manifestations, in based on the ideas of Hermann Cohen. He researched in detail crucial for the philosophy of dialogue ideas of relations of persons (I, Thou, We) already in his works 1904 and 1919. Other authors of the philosophy of dialogue (Rosenzweig, Buber and Bakhtin) formulated their ideas later (1921-1929) and relied heavily on the works of Cohen. Cohen not only researched in detail relationships of persons, but he introduced into philosophy the idea of correlation, which underlies the understanding of the I-Thou relationship. Cohen also realized that the concept of correlation gives access to the actual time that cannot be comprehended within the framework of classical ontology.

This article proves that the philosophy of dialogue in its various manifestations, in based on the ideas of Hermann Cohen. He researched in detail crucial for the philosophy of dialogue ideas of relations of persons (I, Thou, We) already in his works 1904 and 1919. Other authors of the philosophy of dialogue (Rosenzweig, Buber and Bakhtin) formulated their ideas later (1921-1929) and relied heavily on the works of Cohen. Cohen not only researched in detail relationships of persons, but he introduced into philosophy the idea of correlation, which underlies the understanding of the I-Thou relationship. Cohen also realized that the concept of correlation gives access to the actual time that cannot be comprehended within the framework of classical ontology.

Parlor Press 2016.

Foregrounding language and the utterance in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his colleague Valentin Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality examines their insights against the background of the classical, predominantly Aristotelian, verbal liberal arts of rhetoric, dialectic, and poetics. First setting Bakhtinian dialogics against a narrow rhetoric aimed at winning over others, it goes on, drawing upon the school's earlier phenomenological and sociological writings, to elaborate a Bakhtinian discourse theory that sees all utterances as rhetorical in an expanded sense and poetry as an imitation of rhetorical utterance.

Bialostosky invents a Bakhtinian dialogic criticism that he situates against such figures as Todorov, Gadamer, Rorty, and Booth and explores the potentials of Bakhtin-School thought for a revitalized rhetorical criticism. He draws parallels between Bakhtin's dialogism and Michael Billig's sophistic sociology and argues the importance of language and history in Bakhtin's earliest work against Morson and Emerson's emphasis on ethics. He sets Aristotelian rhetoric against Bakhtin's discourse theory and reads Aristotle's Poetics against the grain to bring out its category of "thought" or dianoia as a site from which a Bakhtinian poetics of utterance can be recovered. A compilation and extension of more than thirty years' work on the Bakhtin School, Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality demonstrates the rich implications of Bakhtin's works for rhetorical theory, practice, and understanding.

Contents.
Preface.
1. Introduction
Part I. Dialogics, Rhetoric, Criticism
2. Dialogics as an Art of Discourse
3. Booth, Bakhtin, and the Culture of Criticism
4. Rhetoric, Literary Criticism, Theory, and Bakhtin
5. Bakhtin and Rhetorical Criticism
6. Antilogics, Dialogics, and Sophistic Social Psychology
Part II. Architectonics, Poetics, Rhetoricality, Liberal Education
7. Bakhtin's "Rough Draft"
8. Architectonics, Rhetoric, and Poetics in the Bakhtin School's Early Phenomenological and Sociological Texts
9. Aristotle's Rhetoric and Bakhtin's Discourse Theory
10. Rereading the Place of Rhetoric in Aristotle's Poetics in Light of Bakhtin's Discourse Theory: Rhetoric as Dianoia, Poetics as an Imitation of Rhetoric
11. Liberal Education, Writing, and the Dialogic Self

Für eine Untersuchung zu der Frage „Was wusste Wittgenstein über Hegels Philosophie?“ zeigte sich die Schwierigkeit einer relativ schwachen Datenlage verbunden mit dem Wunsch aus diesem Wenigen möglichst viel historischen Sinn zu erzeugen. Wo verlaufen hier die methodischen Grenzen? Wenn Wittgenstein anmerkt: „Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten“ (VB: 483), hört er im deutschen Wort dichten sicherlich neben dem Aspekt des Poetischen auch denjenigen des Kreativen. Die Frage nach Wunsch und Wirklichkeit in der Wittgenstein-Forschung wird am konkreten Beispiel von Wittgensteins Russlandreise gezeigt und ermöglicht zugleich einen Einblick in Wittgensteins Interesse für russische Philosophie. Diese betont Polyphonie und Dialogizität bezogen auf die ursprüngliche mystische Einheit für die Glaube und Wissen sich nur nachträglich formell trennen lassen. Wittgenstein begegnet diesem Anspruch indem er die Philosophie als Projekt einer Synoptischen Übersicht kennzeichnet und ihre Tätigkeit als das Dringen auf eine übersichtliche Darstellung charakterisiert, die zugleich ihre methodischen Grenzen zeigen muss.

Aim: Our aim is to offer and illustrates a novel meta-methodology to enhance the rigour of method selection and understanding of results in pluralist qualitative research (PQR).
Method: To do so, we make innovative use of Braun and Clarke’s (2006) articulation of four discrete dimensions characterising different forms of thematic analysis. We provide secondary analyses of an interview from the Social Media, Men who have Sex with Men and Sexual Health project using critical discursive psychology, dialogical analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and psychosocial narrative analysis.
Results: All four methods identified aspects of three central foci: Compartmentalisation, Detachment, and Jouissance.
Conclusion: We discuss how our proposed meta-methodology provides a rationale for the selection of methods in a PQR, offer evidence that it can anticipate the relative similarity in focus of the methods employed, and argue that our meta-methodology reveals the possibility of identifying an ‘axial’ or ‘hub’ method’ of a PQR which might be particularly fruitful in exploring commonalities and differences in results. Finally, we examine the synergies and challenges of combining pairs of the methods we used.

Objectives: This article aims to elaborate chronotope disruption - a changed relation to time and space - as a sensitizing concept for understanding chronic illness narratives. Methods: Sixteen men and 16 women with Type 2 diabetes were purposefully sampled. Each was interviewed about his or her experience of diabetes self-management using the biographical-narrative interview method. Transcripts were inspected for key moments defined as emotionally laden stories relevant to the purpose of the research. We present dialogically inflected discursive analysis of exemplar extracts. Results: The analysis demonstrates how the concept of chronotope disruption helps identify, and understand, important aspects of patients’ chronic illness narratives. First, we investigate how medical advice can conflict with embodied experience and how progressive bodily deterioration can provoke a reevaluation of past illness (self-mis)management. Second, the increasing temporal and spatial intrusion of chronic illness into participants’ lives is examined. Finally, we focus on the masquerade of health as an attempt to manage, hide, or deny that one is physically challenged. Conclusions: Chronotope disruption offers a useful sensitizing concept for approaching chronic illness narratives and around which to organize analytical insights and to develop practice. Chronotope analysis fills an important gap in the science
through compensating current health sciences’ focus on rationality, cognition, and prospective time (prediction) with a patient-oriented focus on emotionality, embodiment, and retrospective time (nostalgia). Chronotope disruption could be used to develop practice by gaining empathic understanding of patients’ life-worlds and provides a tool to examine how new technologies change the way in which the chronically ill have “being” in the world.

This call for papers is addressed to those scholars from any discipline who are interested in exploring the complexities of the postcolonial and ‘postsocialist’ space by using Bakhtinian ideas and theories as a critical starting point for the development of an adequate methodology.
Selected papers will be published in a special issue/section of Baltic Worlds, a peer-reviewed printed, journal based at Centre for Baltic and Eastern European Studies, Södertörn University. Baltic Worlds is a multidisciplinary journal with focus on research on the Baltic Sea Region, East Europe, Russia and the post-Soviet countries. You may find the journal open access at www.balticworlds.com, free of charge both for authors and readers.
Please send your proposals (300-500 words) together with your short CV to Paromita Chakrabarti (chakrabarti.p@gmail.com) and Yulia Gradskova (yulia.gradskova@sh.se) before December 10. The full size papers are expected in early March, 2016. The special issue is scheduled to be published in Baltic Worlds during 2017.

Cet article a pour but de mettre en évidence les phénomènes de plurilinguisme et de polyphonie dans certains textes typiques du roman de bandits populaire grec. L’examen des ces phénomènes, proposés à l’origine par un des théoriciens les plus importants de la littérature et du langage, M. Bakhtine, contribue à l’étude historique et sociale ainsi qu'à la recherche plus poussée des modes de construction des représentations du banditisme social dans les textes du roman populaire, en renvoyant directement aux mentalités populaires de l'époque de production de ces textes.
Le roman populaire en tant que genre littéraire, et en opposition avec la monophonie de la poésie, présente de façon remarquable la polyphonie en tant que coexistence et/ou conflit de nombreux systèmes linguistiques et sémiotiques différents. Les observations de Bakhtine nous amènent à la recherche de la manière dont la polyphonie et l’intertextualité s’organisent au sein du discours du roman de bandits populaire.
Plus concrètement, cette recherche renvoie aux divers types de liaison entre les différents niveaux de discours dans les textes, ainsi qu’à la relation entre les différentes voix, particulièrement celle de l'auteur et celle du narrateur, celle du narrateur et celle des personnages. Ainsi, on voit émerger l’idéologie et le sens caché renfermés dans chacune des “langues” différentes  du texte, en rapport avec le phénomène du banditisme social dans l'espace helladique du 19ème et 20ème siècle. Les approches théoriques bakhtiniennes du discours romanesque du roman littéraire (savant) peuvent être également opératoires en ce qui concerne les textes de la paralittérature et notamment les dialogues fictionnels dans les romans populaires. Elles offrent ainsi les moyens pour une approche plus approfondie du discours des textes. Elles nous permettent en effet de passer des “intentions” des textes, intentio operis selon U. Eco, aux “intentions” des auteurs tout en restant strictement au niveau du discours de ces textes. Au fond, l'analyse des textes renvoie au conflit entre le discours traditionnel et le discours moderne, ainsi qu'à l'acceptation du phénomène du banditisme social en tant qu’élément important de la confrontation de la société traditionnelle avec l'Etat moderne.

La linea culturale menippea, derivata dall'antica satira menippea (risalente alle opere perdute del filosofo cinico Menippo di Gadara), giunge a influenzare, attraverso l'interpretazione di Bachtin, anche la letteratura moderna e contemporanea, risultando particolarmente vitale anche nella letteratura e nel cinema italiani degli anni dai Cinquanta ai Settanta. Questo volume si propone di analizzare da una prospettiva menippea l'intera opera di uno scrittore «corsaro» come Pier Paolo Pasolini (dalla poesia alla narrativa al teatro e al cinema); mentre la seconda parte, in un percorso a metà fra letteratura e cinema, è dedicata all'analisi di alcune opere di uno scrittore e di un regista in cui tale linea culturale risulta particolarmente efficace e vitale: Alberto Arbasino e Federico Fellini.