For the vast majority of his life, the Russian philosopher, linguist, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin failed to find the intellectual celebrity that many in the humanities now feel he deserves. His major works were not immediately published in Russian and, for the most part, were not published in English until after his death. It was only in the final third of the twentieth century, a time of immense social, cultural, and economic upheaval, that Bakhtin's work was plucked from relative obscurity to help explain the brave new world of global consumer culture and shed light on the relationship between consumer symbolism, ideology, and human subjectivity.

Bakhtin was primarily interested in language and the interaction that takes place between different forms of language. He used the ...