Abstract

What if we were to understand Bahktin’s “dialogicality” as a description of the way we read, not the way we write? For Timothy Bewes, it is not the case that one novel is dialogical and another not; rather, a critic’s relationship to the novel should be dialogical. On this basis, Bewes questions the existence of the so-called crisis in literary meaning, developing a trajectory between Dostoevsky and contemporary novelists.