The international study of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin has recently witnessed a significant reorientation. Bakhtin was originally introduced in the West, from the 1960s to the 1980s, by two important structuralist theoreticians, Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov, who represented him as a forerunner of structuralist thinking. In Bakhtin's ‘dialogism’ and ‘polyphony’ they saw forms of intertextuality (Kristeva 1980; Todorov 1984), defined by Kristeva as follows: ‘Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality comes to take the place of the notion of intersubjectivity’ (Kristeva 1980, 66). In this interpretation, Bakhtin is placed within a framework of thinking in which the constitutive meaning of the interpretative subject is erased and the subject of narration is ‘reduced to a code, to a nonperson, to an anonymity’ (Kristeva 1980, 74). As an extension of this, it is in the framework of late structuralist discourse pluralism that Bakhtin's concept of ‘dialogism’ has since the 1980s flourished especially in the United States (Holquist 2002). This interpretation of Bakhtin as a textualist is now recognized as an undue ‘familiarization’, occurring in an intellectual atmosphere in which structuralism was dominant (cf. Zbinden 2006).