Bakhtin's Adventure: An Essay on Life Without Meaning

A bold rereading of Mikhail Bakhtin’ s groundbreaking theories A century after Mikhail Bakhtin first began formulating his now-canonical reflections on freedom and literary representation, we often seem as confused as ever about the relationship between narrative form and what it means to live ethically. Focusing on the throughline of adventure in Bakhtin's thought, we find a peculiar, yet no less ethically urgent challenge: not to imagine the literary hero as if they were a real person but to recognize how we are always imagining real people as if they were literary characters. This is a provocation with far-reaching consequences for how we understand ourselves, each other, and our situatedness in space and time. In Bakhtin's Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning, Benjamin Paloff argues that the major aesthetic, ethical, and sociological threads of Bakhtin's thought intersect in his concept of adventure. Reading across a wide variety of media, from classic literature to contemporary film, Paloff demonstrates how, for Bakhtin and his interlocutors, the test of human freedom is whether narrative means nothing beyond its own adventure. Reframed in this light, Bakhtin's most influential ideas (eventness, chronotope, heteroglossia, polyphony, carnival) form a cohesive model for how to maintain ethical relations in a world where we can never really know each other the way we know ourselves.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements . An Essay on the Meaning of Adventure . Smoke and Mirrors, or: How Real Is Someone You Only Read About? 2. What’ s a Hero? or: Can We Know Too Much about a Person? 3. Storytellers and Those They Love, or: Why Does Thinking about Someone Else Feel Like Work? 4. Making Fun, or: Why Is It Sometimes Better Not to Be Part of the Joke? 5. That Handsome Stranger in the Mirror, or: How Do We Speak for Ourselves? . There's No Ransom If You Don't Have a Hostage, or: Does Adventure Mean? Notes Index

About the Author :
Benjamin Paloff is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Review :
"What is adventure? It is not knowing where you belong, where you are going, whom you are dealing with— and this provocative little book suggests that for Bakhtin, such an attitude is ethical and freedom-bearing, both toward oneself and toward others. Against our compulsion to plot people and things, Paloff gathers Bakhtin's scattered parts into an exhilarating, newly scary whole." - Caryl Emerson, Princeton University