Mikhail Bakhtin

Thinker of Laugh, Crisis and Change in the Theory of the Speech Genres

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate how the themes of laught, crisis and change guide the theory of speech genres and, in particular, of the novel genre in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, taking as a background Aristotle’s Poetics and Hegel`s Courses in Aesthetics (2014[1842]). The research is bibliographical and makes use of a thesis defense stenogram, two oral presentation theses, letters, part of M. Bakhtin’s works produced between the late 1920s and 1960s and works by commentators. We disco vered that M. Bakhtin situates the novel and the representation of the word in it at a ntime of changes and crises in European languages and in the discursive life of peoples, at the same time that this genre destabilizes established poetic systems. Bakhtin’s theory of genres develops in a tense dialogue between the finished literary past and the extraliterary and literary contemporaneity in crisis and formation.