<i>Polyphony</i> for a novel’s stylistics: a logistical map of ‘transsemiotization’

Abstract

The article discusses the intermedial transfer of the concept of polyphony in Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Leo Spitzer’s studies of Dostoevsky and Proust from the late 1920s. There are plenty of good reasons to compare the two scholars’ works. Firstly, Spitzer’s stylistics was of key importance to Bakhtin throughout his scientific career. Secondly, there is a correlation between the methods for studying Proust’s and Dostoevsky’s novels, which Bakhtin considered as the pinnacle of the European and Russian novel, respectively. The stylistic revolution of the novel anticipated not only the development of 20th-c. prose, the polyphonic novel and stylistic perspectivism, but also the trajectory of theoretical innovations, the study of the dialogue between the Self and the Other, as well the verbal symphonization of the author/narrator’s outer and inner Self. Once polyphony was extrapolated into the field of the novel, the problem of the spoken word and oral genres became more compelling. From the late 1930s until the early 1940s, Spitzer and Bakhtin independently set out to study the genre of ‘shouts’ ( cri ): Spitzer in Proust’s The Prisoner , and Bakhtin in Rabelais’s novel and Russian literature. Bakhtin’s short theoretical essay on the genre of ‘shouts’ in a Russian town square was discovered by the author of this article and is published here for the first time.