The Theory of Literary Discourse and Bakhtin

Abstract

The argument between the contextualists and non-contextualists in some academic centers dealing with literature indicates that the contemporary methodological pluralism perpetuates the antinomy between the paradigms of historism and immanentism in literary criticism. It seems that its "marginal" position allows Slovene literary criticism to respond to this dilemma by introducing the theory of literary discourse, theory and history of the creative subject, or a more intense hermeneutic practice. By examining the relation of these projects to Bakhtin, the article analyzes the topicality of the method which the Russian thinker confronted the constitutive antinomy between the external and internal approaches and hence examined the sole basis of literary criticism.