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Contemporary Cultural Theory

provide an implicit theoretical legitimation for literary
modernism, as no doubt they were intended to.

Bakhtin and Volosinov
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and the other members of the
so-called ‘Leningrad Circle’, such as Valentin Volosinov, were
much less committed than Shklovsky and Jakobson to a strictly
Saussurean model, though their work certainly had its origins in
debate with Formalism. As against Saussure’s concern with ‘the
relationship of sign to sign within a closed system’ (Volosinov, 1973,
p. 58), Volosinov argued that criticism should seek to explain how
concrete utterances are produced in particular socio-cultural
contexts. This led him to an understanding of ideology as a cultur-
ally specific representation of the world through language:
‘Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present too’, he wrote:
‘Everything ideological possesses semiotic value’ (p. 10). If significa-
tion is socially produced in this way, then it follows that ‘word is
a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and
for whom it is meant ...I give myself verbal shape from another’s
point of view, ultimately from the point of view of the commu-
nity to which I belong’ (p. 86). This, in turn, suggests that speaker
and addressee share patterned speech situations, which condi-
tion what can be communicated, but are in turn conditioned by
such dialogue. As a result, speech situations are both more open-
ended and more subject to inflection according to class,
profession, generation, region and so on than in a convention-
ally Saussurean account. This open-ended multiplicity is what
Bakhtin variously denoted by the terms ‘heteroglossia’, ‘dialo-
gism’ and ‘polyphony’.
Bakhtin found evidence of such polyphony in the novels of
Dostoevsky, where the characters are ‘not voiceless slaves’
subject to a monological and unitary consciousness, but rather
‘free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable
of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him’
(Bakhtin, 1984, p. 6). Later, he would find similarly dialogic
tendencies in Cervantes, Defoe, Sterne and Fielding, in Menip-
pean satire, confessions, drama and poetry, and, above all,

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