Critic Bios

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) left his studies at the University of St. Petersburg in 1918 and rapidly became a leading voice in the brief but fertile period of Russian criticism between the revolution and Stalin's rise to power. Though critical of the Russian Formalists, Bakhtin shared many of their interests and sought to reconcile formalism with a more contextual approach. His first publications appeared in the 1920's; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, published in 1929, introduced the distinction between "dialogic" and "monologic" that he would develop in the following decades. Bakhtin suffered greatly during the Stalinist era; he was arrested in 1929, imprisoned in a Soviet work camp during the 1930's, and was then forced into exile for the remainder of his life. He settled in the city of Mordovia in 1945, where he held a minor teaching position until his retirement in 1961. His work began to draw attention in the 1960's, first within the Soviet Union and then throughout the West. Rabelais and his World, written in the 1930's, was finally published in the 1960's. An English translation of four important essays appeared in 1982 under the title, The Dialogic Imagination; by the late 1980's, Bakhtin's was among the most cited names in literary criticism.

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was born in Quebec, Canada, and studied English literature at the University of Toronto and later at Oxford. In 1936, after a period of theological study, Frye was ordained as a minister in the United Church of Canada. He joined the English department of Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1939, where he remained for the rest of his life (becoming the first University Professor of the University of Toronto in 1967). Frye first gained attention as a critic with the 1947 publication of Fearful Symmetry, a watershed study of William Blake which introduced Frye's own uniquely intertextual approach to criticism. His critical program was stated more fully a decade later in Anatomy of Criticism. Frye's influence began to wane in the years following publication of Anatomy; his methods were perceived as idiosyncratic, though his reputation as a major critic has not diminished. His ambitious final project, an intertextual analysis of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, was published as The Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990).