About the Faculty

Michael Holquist
michael.holquist@yale.edu

Professor Holquist graduated from the Yale Graduate School in 1968, after a checkered undergraduate career (interrupted by 3 1/2 years in Army Intelligence). He was amember of the Slavic Department from 1968 to 1975, when he became Chair of the Slavic Department at University of Texas, Austin, and from 1980 to 1986 Chair of the Slavic Department at Indiana University. In 1986 He returned to Yale with a joint appointment in comparative literature and Slavic.

His publications include articles on a wide variety of topics (utopian fiction, detective stories, Lewis Carroll’s nonsense, plus several Russian writers). After his first book, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton, 1977; 2nd ed. Northwestern University Press, 1986), he devoted himself for a number of years to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, translating and editing four volumes (M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays on Theory of the Novel and the Philosophy of Language. A scholarly edition prepared and, with Caryl Emerson, translated from M. M. Bakhtin's Voprosy estetiki i literatury; Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981. [Paperback eds. of above, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1992.]; M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. A collection edited with Caryl Emerson; trans. Vern McGee; Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987. M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, trans. Vadim Liapunov; Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, August, 1990.M. M. Bakhtin, Toward A Philosophy Of The Act. Trans. and co-editor, Vadim Liapunov. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, October, 1993. In addition, a biography of Bakhtin (Mikhail Bakhtin (with Katerina Clark). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984.[2nd. ed., June, 1985. A paperback edition appeared in 1986.] He also wrote Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. London and New York: Routledge, November, 1990. A revised second edition of this book was published by Routledge in 2002.

Professor Holquist has taught courses on the modern European novel, literary theory, and is currently at work on a book devoted to modern German and Russian philology. He is also interested in fostering closer relations between Comparative Literature and International Studies, in connection with which he serves as Co-Chair (with Arjun Appadurai of the Crossing Borders initiative at Yale).