BOOKS
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"purely Bakhtinian" the text ("The second part [of
Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language],
while not free of Marxist declarations, seems
more purely Bakhtinian in its stress on context and intonation.... "):
it seems an extraordinary principle to arbitrate the disputed texts by
throwing out all the Marxism and imputing it to the cruder political
tastes of his friends.
There are delights in the book, particularly the account of
Mikhail's sibling rivalry with his brother Nikolai, who became Pro–
fessor of Classics at the University of Birmingham in England and
who taught Wittgenstein Russian. (In 1930 Nikolai discovered his
brother's book on Dostoevsky in a French translation in Paris: Dos–
toevsky was Wittgenstein's favorite author; did Wittgenstein read
the book, one wonders? Is Terry Eagleton right in speculating that
Wittgenstein's late phase may be, to some degree, "Bakhtinian"?)
The authors bravely attempt to do justice to the polymath
breadth of Bakhtin's thinking, yet there seems no doubt that a failure
to recognize the full
political
charge of his thought troubles the
evenhandedness of their design. In their introduction they caution
us to be skeptical, to "not take any particular version of Bakhtin, in–
cluding ours, as canonical."
It
is justly and modestly said, and the
reader should be armed, and not disarmed, by the warning.
ALLON WHITE
THE GREAT TRADITION
AN AMERICAN PROCESSION: THE MAJOR AMERICAN WRITERS
FROM 1830 TO 1933-THE CRUCIAL CENTURY.
By
Alfred Kazln.
Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.
It is hardly a surprise that in
An American Procession
Alfred
Kazin writes no ordinary literary criticism. Since
On Native Grounds
(1942), that precociously magisterial work of his youth (he was then
twenty-seven years old), Kazin's has been a distinctive critical voice,
whether in literary essay, cultural commentary, or memoir: vivid,
engaged, quarrelsome, lyrical. The present book is vintage Kazin: a
book unmistakably
written,
an account of one reader's experiences of
a world, in this case constituted by a "procession" of twenty Ameri-
