Bakhtin – a Personal Memoir

Abstract

This text recalls and comments, from a personal perspective, on Mikhail Bakhtin’s impact on the Brazilian academic scene during the modernization of language studies in the 1970s and 1980s, when “Russian formalism” was revived as a research line, in the wake of Linguistics rising to a cutting-edge science, in waves of predominantly French theoretical immigration. Within this panorama, the essay looks back on the two main focuses of Bakhtin’s work – the thematic-literary and the strictly linguistic – highlighting the permanence and vitality of his thought in forming a theory of the novel. Finally, the text covers a brief reflection on the contemporary sense of literary sensibility, from the multiplicity of the voices that constitute the fabric of literature in the Bakhtinian perspective.