Bakhtin's Adventure

An Essay on Life Without Meaning
A bold rereading of Mikhail Bakhtin’ s groundbreaking theories

A century after Mikhail Bakhtin first began formulating his now-canonical reflections on freedom and literary representation, we often seem as confused as ever about the relationship between narrative form and what it means to live ethically. Focusing on the throughline of adventure in Bakhtin's thought, we find a peculiar, yet no less ethically urgent challenge: not to imagine the literary hero as if they were a real person but to recognize how we are always imagining real people as if they were literary characters. This is a provocation with far-reaching consequences for how we understand ourselves, each other, and our situatedness in space and time.

In Bakhtin's Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning, Benjamin Paloff argues that the major aesthetic, ethical, and sociological threads of Bakhtin's thought intersect in his concept of adventure. Reading across a wide variety of media, from classic literature to contemporary film, Paloff demonstrates how, for Bakhtin and his interlocutors, the test of human freedom is whether narrative means nothing beyond its own adventure. Reframed in this light, Bakhtin's most influential ideas (eventness, chronotope, heteroglossia, polyphony, carnival) form a cohesive model for how to maintain ethical relations in a world where we can never really know each other the way we know ourselves.

UK Delivery:

• Free delivery on all orders of £10 or more.
• £1.49 delivery fee on orders below £10.
• UK orders are shipped via Royal Mail 2nd Class.

International Delivery:

• Flat rate delivery charges vary by country.

Dispatch and Delivery Times:

• All orders are shipped from our warehouse in Northampton, UK within 48 hours of receipt during working hours.
• UK mainland orders typically arrive within 3-5 working days via Royal Mail 2nd Class.
• International estimated delivery times:
• Europe & Channel Islands: 7 to 10 working days
• USA: 7 to 15 working days
• Rest of the World: 9 to 21 working days

View our full delivery infomation here.