Page 35 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975) Bakhtin was born in Russia, studied at St Petersburg
University and worked as a professor in the small town of Saransk after spending a
significant period of his life in exile in Kazakhstan. Much of his work emanated
from a group of thinkers known as ‘the Bakhtin circle’ and indeed some of his work
is thought to have been published under other names, most notably that of
Volosinov. Bakhtin was critical of formalism and instead conceives of language as
a diverse, living, action-oriented phenomenon where meaning arises out of a
dialogic relation between speakers and interlocutors. Heteroglossia is Bakhtin’s term
for the multi-voiced workings of language and culture that constitute the field of
signs in which there is a struggle over meaning. For Bakhtin the renaissance
‘carnivalesque’, as documented by Rabelais, is a manifestation of the heterogeneity
of culture and the impulse to resist the official languages of the powerful.
• Associated concepts Anti-essentialism, carnivalesque, dialogic, intertextuality,
language, meaning, polysemy.
• Tradition(s) Hermeneutics, Marxism.
• Reading Bakhtin, M. (1965) Rabelais and his World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press

Barthes, Roland (1915–1980) The French writer, critic, teacher and theorist Roland
Barthes exerted a very significant influence on the development of cultural studies,
particularly in its movement from culturalism to structuralism during the 1970s. His
work was instrumental in assisting cultural thinkers to break with the notion of the
text as a carrier of transparent meaning. In particular, he brought the methods of
semiotics to bear on a wide range of cultural phenomena to illuminate the
argument that all texts are constructed with signs in social contexts. Central to
Barthes’s work is the role of signs in generating meaning and framing the way texts
are read. Thus he explored the way that the naturalization of connotative meanings
enables that which is cultural to appear as pre-given universal truths, which he
called myths. He famously declared the ‘death of the author’ as a way of illustrating
the argument that meaning does not reside with individual writers but rather with
the interplay between the wider structures of cultural meaning and the interpretive
acts of readers.
• Associated concepts Author, meaning, myth, reading, signs, text.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, poststructuralism, semiotics, structuralism.
• Reading Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies. London: Cape.

Base and superstructure The metaphor of the base and superstructure derives from
Marxism and is a way of explaining the relationship between the economy and

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