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All of the people I have mentioned so far-and others-have a great deal of difficulty in reconciling the various Bakhtins as one writer or one set of ideas.Something is always left out (like Holquist's finessing the problems of authorship) or glossed over (as in White's preliminary remarks on the hegemonic discourse of the novel). In this paper I want to suggest that one of the reasons why these "unifying" visions of Bakhtin will inevitably fail is because there are two dominant and distinct-though by no means mutually exclusive-strains that run through Bakhtin's work; that these strains account for some of the vastly different concerns in that work; and that, because Bakhtin was never fully able to...
