This first comparative study of philosophers and literary theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin examines the relationship between the experience of the modern world and the forms that we use to make sense of that experience. Analyzing their views on art, habit, tradition, and language, this comparative study results in a radical reconsideration of received views about thinkers as well as in a reconsideration of the modernity that Bakhtin and Benjamin lived in and that we continue to inhabit now.

This first comparative study of the philosophers and literary critics, Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin, focuses on the two thinkers' conceptions of experience and form, investigating parallels between Bakhtin's theories of responsibility, dialogue, and the novel, and Benjamin's theories of translation, montage, allegory, and the aura.