Personality, dialogue and carnival in M. Bakhtin's world outlook

This work examines the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin is becoming established as one of the giants of 20th century literary criticism, despite his work being unknown in the West until the 1970's. In his work, Bakhtin also insists that each person is unique and irreplaceable. Bakhtin introduces an «architectonic» or schematic model of the human psyche which consists of components: «I-for-myself», «I-for-the-other». As a literary analyst, Bakhtin emphasises the location of particular authors in the speech-genres they deploy, and in their spatial and temporal context. Dostoevsky was one of the first novelists for Bakhtin who managed to convey the dialogical nature of words and utterances.