Dialogic reading or “critical dialogism”? Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve through the prism of alterity according to Bakhtin

A puzzling and fragmented posthumous book, Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve anticipates the “dialogic criticism” that Todorov emphasizes in Bakhtin’s thought: a criticism based on an ongoing conversation with the reader, because dialogic criticism speaks not about works but to works—or rather with works.