Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form

This first comparative study of philosophers and literary theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin examines the relationship between the experience of the modern world and the forms that we use to make sense of that experience. Analyzing their views on art, habit, tradition, and language, this comparative study results in a radical reconsideration of received views about thinkers as well as in a reconsideration of the modernity that Bakhtin and Benjamin lived in and that we continue to inhabit now.

TIM BEASLEY-MURRAY is Lecturer in Slovak Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK. He has published articles on Literary, Cultural, and Political Theory, and Czech, Habsburg, and Slovak literature.