We begin this preface on the day after we first met in the flesh, or, to use more Bakhtinian vocabulary, in chronotopic co-presence. Although we had recently sent the first draft of this manuscript off to Sage for review, and had become close colleagues and collaborators over many months of working together, until this point we had met only in cyberspace. Such are the delights of the Internet and the work of Bakhtin that scholars find themselves plunging into intimate and excited conversation despite being thousands of miles and a national border apart – in this case, the distance and the national border between St John's, Newfoundland and Ames, Iowa.

This meeting consummated a project that had grown out of a correspondence between us on the philosophy of nature in Bakhtin's writings. We both recognized a gap in the literature on alternative appropriations of Bakhtin – in the area of ecology, and in other domains in the social and human sciences as well. Michael Gardiner suggested that we co-edit a volume that would bring together some of the diverse strands of the new scholarship on Bakhtin, drawing not only on established scholars in this area, but also authors who are newly discovering his rich and suggestive writings. We were delighted that our solicitations by letter and by electronic means generated an enormous, perhaps even overwhelming, response – an embarrassment of riches. As the volume took shape, certain thematic configurations of this new scholarship began to suggest themselves. And, in the end, we selected the thirteen chapters that, as we saw it, best reflected the promise of a Bakhtinian legacy for the human sciences.

But, again, we had never met, nor even spoken on the phone. Our relationship was entirely virtual, and hence curiously decorporealized – yet not undialogical. To be sure, there is a lack of immediacy in a dialogue lacking full co-presence. Some textual and biographical evidence suggests that Bakhtin himself was suspicious of electronically mediated communication, and that, like Martin Buber, he considered the face-to-face encounter to be the most genuine manifestation of dialogue. Certainly, a purely electronic relationship tested the meaning and limits of dialogue, both as a metaphor and in terms of the practicalities of linguistic interchange.

A series of contingencies, however, has happily brought us together on this hot summer day in July, on an island in the St Lawrence River, where we are jointly composing this preface on a laptop computer in Mike Bell's boathouse. And even this briefest of chronotopic encounters confirms Bakhtin's main insight: that dialogue is not only unfinalizable, but that it always retains an element of surprise, of a loophole in time and space, of [Page x]something that remains yet to say. This open-endedness is what nourishes the will to dialogue – which, of course, is the central theme of this volume.

The portion of the book written by us is dedicated to our respective families – Rita Gardiner, Diane Mayerfeld, and Samuel Bell. We would also like to acknowledge in particular Chris Rojek, whom we initially approached with this idea, and Robert Rojek, for being such an exemplary and enthusiastic editor, and for helping to nurture this project from its earliest phases to its eventual completion. We also recognize the work of Pascale Carrington, Teresa Warren and Melissa Dunlop at Sage, and the anonymous external reviewers. And finally, of course, the contributors to the volume are to be congratulated for their patience, attention to detail, and fidelity to various deadlines. To all we offer our thanks and hopes for future communions of, as Bakhtin would have put it, ‘participatory thinking’.

MB

MG

30 July 1997, Tar Island, Ontario, Canada

Amended, mid-October, 1997, in Cyberspace