Michael Holquist, professor of Slavic languages and literatures and chairman of the department of comparative literature at Yale, has been awarded an honorary doctoral degree by Stockholm University in Sweden.
Holquist is closely associated with the Russian theoretician Michail Bakhtin, whose work he has translated and written about extensively. He is widely credited with bringing Bakhtin’s theories to the forefront of literary scholarship and to establishing his work in the mainstream of literary studies in the U.S. and abroad.
Among the books on Bakhtin that Holquist has written or co-authored are “The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays on Theory of the Novel and the Philosophy of Language,” “Mikhail Bakhtin,” the first scholarly Bakhtin biography in English (with Katerina Crark), and “Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World.” Holquist also wrote “The Russian Avant-Garde” and “Art and Answerability.”
The citation for Holquist’s honorary doctorate reads:
“[Michael Holquist] is internationally known for his writings on the Russian literary historian M.M. Bakhtin. He has developed ideas about dialogue into a broad perspective of Western philosophy in classical articles and books. Translation of these into several languages has brought his work to a world audience. The interdisciplinary character of his writings has impacted scholars working in both the humanities and social sciences. He has had a powerful influence on scholars in research centers in Sweden.”
