"great time"
"image of the idea"
A01=Benjamin Paloff
adventure
adventure plot
adventure time
aesthetic activity
aesthetics
apocryphal tale
archetype
author
Author_Benjamin Paloff
Baudrillard
Bildung
Bildungsroman
biography
Carl Jung
carnival
carnivalesque
Category=ATFA
Category=DSA
Category=GTD
Category=QDHR
Cervantes
chronotope
Coen Brothers
contingency
counterfactual
critical theory
dehumanization
Derrida
Don Quixote
Dostoevsky
ekphrasis
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ethical relation
ethics
event
eventness
fairytale
fate
film studies
finalization
folklore
folktales
Franz Kafka
freedom
Freud
grotesque
Gyorgy Lukacs
hero
heteroglossia
historical time
history
humor
hybridization
intertextuality
Jacques Derrida
Joseph Campbell
Julia Kristeva
literary studies
Lord of the Rings
Lukacs
Maurice Blanchot
meaning
media studies
Mikhail Bakhtin
minor character
mirroring
mistaken identity
moment
narrative
narrative theory
open world games
others
parable
Paul Auster
Plot
plotlessness
polyphony
Quentin Tarantino
quest
Rabelais
real life
reality
reality tv
Russian theory
Samuel Beckett
sense of the world
Sigmund Freud
Star Wars
storyteller
storyworld
structuralism
The Matrix
the present
the profane
the sacred
Tom Stoppard
travesty
video games
Vladimir Propp
Wachowskis
Product details
- ISBN 9780810148635
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2026
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Benjamin Paloff is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
