Trashing Caryl Emerson's recent book on Bakhtin?

[Amy Mandelker]

With all due respect to those who have written on this topic, I think it is
important to set the record straight in at least one particular.  Dmitry
Khanin alleges that Caryl Emerson built her career by exploiting an existing
trend in Western scholarship, insinuating that her work on Bakhtin has been
motivated throughout by an opportunistic careerism.  In fact, Caryl Emerson
is largely responsible for the fact that Western non-specialists can read
Bakhtin at all.  Early in her career, before the vogue in Bakhtin had caught
on, she devoted herself to translation work which, as most American scholars
are aware, involves some professional risk for a junior scholar (as
translations do not "count" for tenure).  Producing translations and editions
is, in any case, a somewhat thankless task, as Pushkin reminds us, carried
out by the "cart-horses of civilization."  While I agree with Andrew
Wachtel's irenic observation that critiques of scholarship are certainly
appropriate and, indeed, necessary to the profession, I would like to
interject advice given to me as a graduate student:  Professor Victor Terras
trained us to think rigorously and critique ruthlessly, but always to evince
respect for the scholar as a person and an individual.  Dmitry Khanin
attributes base personal motives to a revisionist scholarly interpretation
("now when it is no longer cool to be a Bakhtin scholar, she `gleefully' gave
a kick to her old master") without exploring in any depth the theoretical
complexities of Emerson's argument.  On a professional forum, such derogatory
and unscholarly remarks must surely be out of place.

Amy Mandelker
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
The Graduate School of the City University of New York