Introduction

Chapter Summary

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin has attracted significant interest in most areas of the humanities. This is due in part to Bakhtin's wide-ranging scholarship, covering widely divergent fields, and his continuing impact through the last decade on ever more diverse disciplines such as literary analysis, linguistics, philosophy, the arts (both visual arts and various other media such as film), psychology, social work and social theory, politics, education, and even feminist studies. Bakhtin is often ambiguous in his conceptual framework, his style is 'untidy', his textuality difficult, and there seems to be an absence of unified meaning across the range of his texts. Many of Bakhtin's terms have therefore attracted a measure of 'fuzziness'. Some scholars would want to restrict some or all Bakhtinian categories to novels in the period of Dostoevsky and later, since they would see Dostoevsky as the first (and greatest) exponent of such concepts.

Keywords: Dostoevsky; feminist studies; fuzziness; humanities; linguistics; literary analysis; Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin; philosophy