Jakobson and Bakhtin:Two Language Arts Theorists in the Twentieth Century

Jakobson and Bakhtin are both renowned literary theorists in the 20th century. Jakobson endeavored to construct a monologic paradigm of poetry; Bakhtin undertook to create a dialogic paradigm of the novel. In the 1920s, Bakhtin criticized formalism, and therefore, in the academic circle, it has been believed for many years that Bakhtin was against Jakobson and his followers. This paper aims to study the similarities and dissimilarities between Jakobson’ s poetic theory and Bakhtin’s novel theory, exploring the nature of the two paradigms and examining their different contributions to the theoretic study of the art of language.