David Lodge’s sprightly novels about academics entertain not least by dramatizing how “the very difficulty and esotericism of theory make it all the more effective for purposes of professional identification, apprenticeship and assessment.” But it is only in the last chapter (just cited) of After Bakhtin, his new collection of essays on fiction and fiction theory, that Professor Lodge’s comic voice can be heard as he there offers a droll tour d’horizon of the fissiparous and internecine ways of American academe. The rest of the book is largely devoted to applying the literary theories of the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin to English novels. But just as the final chapter satirizes career theorists, so the introduction informs us elegiacally that he plans to give up the very sort of academic criticism we are about to read. Thus the book is sandwiched, like a medieval romance written by a repentant monk, between a retraction and a flyting.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) seems to have been a heroic and compelling figure who elaborated prodigies of humane scholarship and thought deep in the Stalinist night; two ideas of his are especially influential today: 1) prose fiction lends itself to “dialogic” language, in which the author allows “characters to articulate different ideological positions without subordinating them to his own authorial speech” and thus makes “interpretive closure in the absolute sense impossible” (Dostoevsky was Bakhtin’s text here); 2) prose fiction developed from and loves to incorporate parody, travesty, the carnival-esque, which all function as