By focusing on the "East European" dialogues and polemics, both contemporary and past, the present volume pursues two aims: 1) It would like to locate the discussion between semiotics and dialectics in an historical context. 2) It would like to make the reader familiar with the solutions proposed by theoreticians like Bakhtin, Lotman, Voloshinov, Fischer and Mukařovský, solutions which, in the past, were frequently ignored by European Marxists, semioticians and sociologists of literature. At present, one cannot help feeling that if they had been familiar with the works of these authors, Marxism, Critical Theory, semiotics and the sociology of literature (of the text) would have evolved differently.