SOURCE: A review of After Bakhtin, in Notes and Queries, Vol. 237, No. 4, December, 1992, pp. 529-30.

In the following review, Sellars offers an unfavorable assessment of After Bakhtin.

The ‘Bakhtin industry’ is undergoing a period of expansion. After Bakhtin, however, is not a study of the Russian literary theorist as such. There is little discussion of Bakhtin criticism—not much on Todorov or de Man, for example, and no mention of Kristeva. As regards Bakhtin himself, Lodge tends to repeat the same quotations (or even misquotations) from one chapter to the next, without furthering a general argument. His book is a ‘collation of warmed-up occasional essays and reviews’, to take one of his own phrases out of context (169). More could have been done to revise the collation, and to explore the problems of Bakhtin.

We are ‘after’ Bakhtin in the obvious sense that he was hardly known at all...