Mikhail Bakhtin Quotes on Knowledge
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher of language, literary theorist, and philosophical anthropologist whose work, much of it written in obscurity and exile, transformed twentieth-century literary theory after its rediscovery in the 1960s. This page collects quotes attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin:
“Every word smells of the contexts in which it has lived its life.”
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Attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin:
“The novel is the great dialogic form.”
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“Not all words ... submit equally to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker.”
p. 294 -
“Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others.”
p. 294