SOURCE: Todorov, Tzvetan. “History of Literature.” In Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, translated by Wlad Godzich, pp. 75-93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

In the following essay, which was originally published in French in 1981, Todorov discusses Bakhtin's theory of literary history as found in several of his works. The critic summarizes Bakhtin's theories of genre and discusses Bakhtin's concept of the “dialogic” in narrative and history—the plurality of competing languages, discourses, and voices within a single literary or historical work.

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An initial hypothesis concerning the history of literature is formulated by Voloshinov/Bakhtin in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language; it is a pure projection of the typology of styles that he had just drawn up (which follows Wölfflin and his opposition of the linear versus pictural). The variants of these two great stylistic types correspond to well-delinated historical periods.

Summing up all we have...