Keele Research Repository

‘Great time’ has usually been seen as a ‘late term’ of Bakhtin’s. However, although it occurs most frequently in works written in the 1960s and 1970s, there is one known instance of its use in the 1940s. This confirms the close association between the notion and Bakhtin’s dominant concerns of the 1930s and 1940s, in particular the ‘becoming’ that he associates with the novel in general and the Bildungsroman in particular. ‘Great time’ thus needs to be examined in the context of the connections between his thought and Hegelian antecedents, as well as his of his approach to time in terms of other models, both philosophical and anthropological.