Publication Details

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to interpret systematically M. M. Bakhtin’s views on genre. Although Aristotle was the first among philosophers – and one of the first among thinkers in general – who focused on the issues of artistic and rhetorical genres, philosophy ignored these issues for a considerably long time. One of the first philosophers who approached the issue of genre within a wider context of the philosophy of language was Mikhail M. Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and literary scholar. As early as in the 1920s he started to reflect on the so-called small speech genres. It later served him as the basis for a remarkable theory of the primary and secondary genres. Bakhtin is a world-wide renowned novel theoretician, but his genre theory is no less topical, since it corresponds with the issues focused on by philosophers much later.