The novel' in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin is at once an empirical phenomenon and a transcendental category. It is not only a fact of literary history: it is also the rubric under which Bakhtin wishes us to think about the forms of sociality and subjectivity that belong to everyday life and modernity. This chapter situates the change in Bakhtin's understanding of the poetic that takes place between the Dostoevsky book and 'Discourse in the novel' within a more general shift in his theory of discourse from fonns to forces, from 'types' to 'lines' within histories. The concept of the poetic is extended in two ways. First, looking at poetry's ideological effects, Bakhtin insists on its complicity in the project of linguistic and sociopolitical unification. Secondly, he both specifies the status of the poetic word and critically refashions from the metalinguistic standpoint some of the established categories of poetic analysis.