Mikhail Bakhtin and the History of Literature: The Past in the Present and the Present in the Past

"Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff" is probably Bakhtin’s most condensated statement of his approach to the history of literature: the great dialogue between heterogeneous voices in a given epoch, but also between genres, chronotopes, images and plot types in the great time; the importance of ‘outsideness’ for the interpreter. Moreover, it contains a critique of the enclosure of the literary work in the narrow context of its epoch of origin – reducing the history of literature to series of succeeding boxes.
As a way of profiling Bakhtin, a comparison with Rita Felski’s influential position is useful. In her book The Uses of Literature (2008) she denounces ”a hermeneutics of suspicion” in favor of a ”neo-phenomenology that blends historical and phenomenological perspectives”. In the article "Context Stinks" (2011) she focusses polemically on the concept of “context”: “the prevailing picture of context as a kind of box or container in which individual texts are encased and held fast. […] a vertical pile of neatly stacked boxes – what we call periods […]”. Rather than enclosing texts in boxes you can, she argues, do justice to their transtemporal impact by viewing them as “nonhuman actors”.
From a Bakhtinian point of view this seems a sensible position – but can be said to open open doors. Bakhtin has repeatedly criticized the same conception: “The narrow historical horizon of our literary scholarship. Enclosure within the most immediate historical epoch.” (“From Notes Made in 1970-71”). Instead of rejecting the concept of context, he has, however, radically redefined and expanded it. Bakhtin's complex, multi-linear conception of literary history abolishes the primitive idea of a straight-line movement. His "evolving unfolding method" creates dialogue between literary and cultural history and links to rhetoric, media and language. Bakhtin has opened original ways of seeing time in space as well as reading the past in the present and the present in the past.