Mikhail Bakhtin in the context of "Chronotope"

Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. The term is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov (Grammaire du Décaméron, 1969). Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp (Morphology of the Folktale, 1928), and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).

Cognitive narratology is a more recent development that allows for a broader understanding of narrative. Rather than focus on the structure of the story, cognitive narratology asks "how humans make sense of stories" and "how humans use stories as sense-making instruments".

Russian formalism was a school of literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars, such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, and Grigory Gukovsky, who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman as well as on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a large impact on modern literary criticism as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.

Russian formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours. In fact, "Russian Formalism" describes two distinct movements: the OPOJAZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka, Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to the "Russian Formalists," rather than to use the broader and more abstract term of "Formalism."

Heteroglossia is the coexistence of distinct linguistic varieties, styles of discourse, or points of view within a single language (in Greek: hetero- "different" and glōssa "tongue, language"). The term translates the Russian разноречие [raznorechie: literally, "varied-speechedness"], which was introduced by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Слово в романе [Slovo v romane], published in English as "Discourse in the Novel." The essay was published in English in the book The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, translated and edited by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson.

Heteroglossia is the presence in language of a variety of "points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values." For Bakhtin, this diversity of "languages" within a single language brings into question the basic assumptions of system-based linguistics. Every word uttered, in any specific time or place, is a function of a complex convergence of forces and conditions that are unique to that time and place. Heteroglossia is thus "the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance" and that which always guarantees "the primacy of context over text." It is an attempt to conceptualize the reality of living discourse, where there is always a tension between centralizing and decentralizing forces. According to Bakhtin, linguistics—to the extent that it operates on the presumption that language is a system—inevitably suppresses the fundamentally heteroglot nature of language as it is lived and experienced by human beings in their day to day realities.

The twentieth century Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote extensively on the concept of dialogue. Although Bakhtin's work took many different directions over the course of his life, dialogue always remained the "master key" to understanding his worldview. Bakhtin described the open-ended dialogue as "the single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life". In it "a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium."

The Dialogic Imagination (full title: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin) is a book on the nature and development of novelistic prose, comprising four essays by the twentieth century Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. It was edited and translated into English by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, who gave the work its English title.

Holquist and Emerson chose the essays from a collection of six essays by Bakhtin published in Moscow under the title Вопросы литературы и эстетики (Voprosy literatury i ėstetiki; Problems of Literature and Aesthetics). According to Holquist, the unifying theme of the essays is "the novel and its relation to language."The title refers to the central place of the concept of dialogue in Bakhtin's theory of the novel. The novel, unlike other literary forms, embraces heterogeneity in discourse and meaning: it re-creates a reality that is based on the interactions of a variety of subjective consciousnesses and ways of thinking and speaking about the world. In this sense novelistic discourse undermines absolute or authoritative (monologic) language, which is revealed to be merely one form of ideological expression operating within an essentially intersubjective medium. Language, in Bakhtin's view, is inherently dialogic, and the novel is the literary genre that has the greatest capacity to artistically represent this reality. According to John Sturrock, for Bakhtin the novel is "the most complete and the most democratic of genres, coming as close as it is possible for an artform to come to capturing the multiplicity, richness and zest of life itself."

Notes from Underground (pre-reform Russian: Записки изъ подполья; post-reform Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapíski iz podpólʹya; also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) is a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky first published in the journal Epoch in 1864. It is a first-person narrative in the form of a "confession". The work was originally announced by Dostoevsky in Epoch under the title "A Confession".

The novella presents itself as an excerpt from the memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man), who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. Although the first part of the novella has the form of a monologue, the narrator's form of address to his reader is acutely dialogized. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, in the Underground Man's confession "there is literally not a single monologically firm, undissociated word". The Underground Man's every word anticipates the words of an other, with whom he enters into an obsessive internal polemic.

Caryl Emerson is an American literary critic, slavist and translator. She is best known for her books and scholarly commentaries on the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. She has translated some of Bakhtin's most influential works, including Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Emerson was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Princeton University from 1988 until her retirement in 2015. From 1980 to 1987 she was a professor of Russian Literature at Cornell.