[Xmca-l] Re: Voloshinov or Bakhtin? Stylometric analysis

[Charles Bazerman]

Tom,
If you want to convince yourself of the distinctiveness of the two authors, apart from macro issues of ideology and micro issues of style, as you read Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (in any translation in any language), ask yourself what would be the kind of evidence and argument that would be coming from a linguist  and from a literary scholar. Further apparently, there is overlap between some of the topics in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and Volosinov's Doctoral essay in Linguistics, though I believe the text of that is lost. 

This question not only will settle your mind on the authorship issue, it will open up clarity in the interpretation of the work of each, as well as the orientation of Bakhtin when he ventures onto linguistic terrain (as in the essay on Speech Genres).
Chuck

----- Original Message -----
From: mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2015 6:45 am
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Voloshinov or Bakhtin? Stylometric analysis
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>

> Tom
> 
> As indicated in followup messages, there is a lot of controversy on this
> topic. David Kellogg reviewed the book on Bakhtin de masque in MCAIn 2012.
> Vol 19 no. 4.
> Mike
> 
> On Tuesday, February 3, 2015, Tom Martin <Tom.Martin@education.ox.ac.uk>
> wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> > Reading the "Social memory in Soviet thought" chapter in Harry Daniels'
> > Introduction to Vygotsky, I was surprised to learn that there is an
> > authorship debate around the work of the post-Vygotsky writer Voloshinov
> > (whom, to be honest, I had never heard of before today). Apparently 
> much of
> > his work was later attributed to Bakhtin.
> >
> > This caught my interest because I have been playing around with the 
> Stylo
> > suite for R, which does Stylometric analysis. Stylo is being used in 
> a
> > number of interesting projects to make claims about authorship. If anyone
> > sees this Voloshinov/Bakhtin question as being valid and worth 
> pursuing, I
> > would be happy to spend an evening plugging the texts into R to see 
> what
> > comes out. The only hurdle for me would be getting digital versions 
> of the
> > texts in Russian - unfortunately that is beyond my linguistic and Google
> > skills.
> >
> > Best,
> > Tom
> > Doctoral candidate, Oxford University
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
> that creates history. Ernst Boesch.