"
The Dialogic Imagination (first published as a whole in 1975) is a compilation of four essays concerning language and the novel: "Epic and Novel" (1941), "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" (1940), "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937–1938), and "Discourse in the Novel" (1934–1935). It is through the essays contained within The Dialogic Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope, making a significant contribution to the realm of literary scholarship.[19] Bakhtin explains the generation of meaning through the "primacy of context over text" (heteroglossia), the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia) and the relation between utterances (intertextuality).[20][21] Heteroglossia is "the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance."[21][22] To make an utterance means to "appropriate the words of others and populate them with one's own intention."[21][23] Bakhtin's deep insights on dialogicality represent a substantive shift from views on the nature of language and knowledge by major thinkers as Ferdinand de Saussure and Immanuel Kant.[24][25]
In "Epic and Novel", Bakhtin demonstrates the novel’s distinct nature by contrasting it with the epic. By doing so, Bakhtin shows that the novel is well-suited to the post-industrial civilization in which we live because it flourishes on diversity. It is this same diversity that the epic attempts to eliminate from the world. According to Bakhtin, the novel as a genre is unique in that it is able to embrace, ingest, and devour other genres while still maintaining its status as a novel. Other genres, however, cannot emulate the novel without damaging their own distinct identity.[26]
"From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" is a less traditional essay in which Bakhtin reveals how various different texts from the past have ultimately come together to form the modern novel.[27]
"Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" introduces Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. This essay applies the concept in order to further demonstrate the distinctive quality of the novel.[27] The word chronotope literally means "time space" and is defined by Bakhtin as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature."[28] For the purpose of his writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is forced to make use of the organizing categories of the real world in which he lives. For this reason chronotope is a concept that engages reality.[29]
The final essay, "Discourse in the Novel", is one of Bakhtin’s most complete statements concerning his philosophy of language. It is here that Bakhtin provides a model for a history of discourse and introduces the concept of heteroglossia.[27] The term heteroglossia refers to the qualities of a language that are extralinguistic, but common to all languages. These include qualities such as perspective, evaluation, and ideological positioning. In this way most languages are incapable of neutrality, for every word is inextricably bound to the context in which it exists.[30]
Dialogic:
The English terms dialogic and dialogism often refer to the concept used by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin in his work of literary theory, The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin contrasts the dialogic and the "monologic" work of literature. The dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors. It does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but informs and is continually informed by the previous work. Dialogic literature is in communication with multiple works. This is not merely a matter of influence, for the dialogue extends in both directions, and the previous work of literature is as altered by the dialogue as the present one is. Though Bakhtin's "dialogic" emanates from his work with colleagues in what we now call the "Bakhtin Circle" in years following 1918, his work was not known to the West or translated into English until the 1970s. For those only recently introduced to Bakhtin's ideas but familiar with T.S.Eliot, his "dialogic" is consonant with Eliot's ideas in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," where Eliot holds that "the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past".[1] For Bakhtin, the influence can also occur at the level of the individual word or phrase as much as it does the work and even the oeuvre or collection of works. A German cannot use the word "fatherland" or the phrase "blood and soil" without (possibly unintentionally) also echoing (or, Bakhtin would say "refracting") the meaning that those terms took on under National Socialism. Every word has a history of usage to which it responds, and anticipates a future response.
The term 'dialogic', however, does not just apply to literature. For Bakhtin, all language - indeed, all thought - appeared dialogic. This means that everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response. We never, in other words, speak in a vacuum. As a result, all language (and the ideas which language contains and communicates) is dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world. That said, Bakhtin also emphasized certain uses of language that maximized the dialogic nature of words, and other uses that attempted to limit or restrict their polyvocality. At one extreme is novelistic discourse, particularly that of a Dostoevsky (or Mark Twain) in which various registers and languages are allowed to interact and respond to each other. At the other extreme would be the military order (or 1984 newspeak) which attempts to minimize all orientations of the work toward the past or the future, and which prompts no response but obedience.
When scholars in France (notably Julia Kristeva), the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s rediscovered Bakhtin's work, it seemed to fit with the then-nascent concepts of "intertextuality". European social psychologists also applied Bakhtin's work to the study of human social experience, preferring it as a more dynamic alternative to Cartesian monologicality.
A dialog in process stands in contrast to a dialectic process (proposed by G. W. F. Hegel):
- In a dialectic process describing the interaction and resolution between multiple paradigms or ideologies, one putative solution establishes primacy over the others. The goal of a dialectic process is to merge point and counterpoint (thesis and antithesis) into a compromise or other state of agreement via conflict and tension (synthesis). "Synthesis that evolves from the opposition between thesis and antithesis."[1] Examples of dialectic process can be found in Plato's Republic.
- In a dialogic process, various approaches coexist and are comparatively existential and relativistic in their interaction. Here, each ideology can hold more salience in particular circumstances. Changes can be made within these ideologies if a strategy does not have the desired effect. An example of the dialogic process can be found in Nozick's, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
Kristeva’s coinage of “intertextuality” represents an attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics—his study of how signs derive their meaning within the structure of a text—with Bakhtin’s dialogism—his examination of the multiple meanings, or “heteroglossia”, in each text (especially novels) and in each word.[5] For Kristeva,[6] “the notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of intersubjectivity” when we realize that meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated through, or filtered by, “codes” imparted to the writer and reader by other texts. For example, when we read James Joyce’s Ulysses we decode it as a modernist literary experiment, or as a response to the epic tradition, or as part of some other conversation, or as part of all of these conversations at once. This intertextual view of literature, as shown by Roland Barthes, supports the concept that the meaning of a text does not reside in the text, but is produced by the reader in relation not only to the text in question, but also the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process.
More recent post-structuralist theory, such as that formulated in Daniela Caselli's Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (MUP 2005), re-examines "intertextuality" as a production within texts, rather than as a series of relationships between different texts. Some postmodern theorists [7] like to talk about the relationship between "intertextuality" and "hypertextuality"; intertextuality makes each text a "living hell of hell on earth" [8] and part of a larger mosaic of texts, just as each hypertext can be a web of links and part of the whole World-Wide Web. Indeed, the World-Wide Web has been theorized as a unique realm of reciprocal intertextuality, in which no particular text can claim centrality, yet the Web text eventually produces an image of a community--the group of people who write and read the text using specific discursive strategies.[9]
One can also make distinctions between the notions of "intertext", "hypertext" and "supertext". Take for example the Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić. As an intertext it employs quotations from the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions. As a hypertext it consists of links to different articles within itself and also every individual trajectory of reading it. As a supertext it combines male and female versions of itself, as well as three mini-dictionaries in each of the versions.
Discourse in the novel:
calls for form and content to be connected
calls for a sociological approach to investigating language - to move away from "individual and period bound investigations"
269
"But these individual and tendentious
overtones of style, cut off from the fundamentally social modes in
which discourse lives, inevitably come across as flat and abstract
in such a formulation and cannot therefore be studied in organic
unity with a work's semantic components."
individual vs. the social
unitary language - correct language: centripital forces
Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the
historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization,
an expression of th-forces of language. Au nitary language
is not something glven [dan] but is always in essence
posited [zadanl-and at every moment of its linguistic lifc it is
opposed to the realities of heteroglossia.
linguistic norms that also have the power to generate in an effort to reunite
271
move from stable linguistics - to language concieved as idealogically saturated, language as world view...unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization - develops into vital connections
over time - victory of one unitary language
But the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a
"unitary language," operate in the midst of heteroglossia.
272
language into different dialectic groups - but also social groups
decentralization occurring as centralization occurs!
centrifugal and centripidal forces - centralization and decentralization
“Every utterance participates in the "unitary
language" (in its i
I
centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same
time partakes
of social and historical heteroglossia (the
centrifugal, stratifying I
forces).”
273
novel
calls for research into the dialogic
278
dialectics that surround objects
prose artists - elevates heteroglossia into "an impage with finished contours"
BUT - all based on what is "already known" - words built on different words
279
"Dialogue is
studied merely as' a compositional form in the structuring of
speech, but the internal dialogism of the word [which occurs in a
monologic utterance as well as in a rejoinder), the dialogism that
penetrates its entire structure, all its semantic and expressive
layers, is almost entirely ignored."
286
language in poetic world - unitary
hetterglossia and the poetic work?
287
"As a consequence of the prerequisites mentioned above, the
language of poetic genres, when they approach their stylistic
limit,'' often becomes authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative,
sealing itself off from the influence of extraliterary social dialects.
Therefore such ideas as a special "poetic language," a "language
of the gods," a "priestly language of poetry" and so forth could
flourish on poetic soil. It is noteworthy that the poet, should he
not accept the given literary language, will sooner resort to the
artificial creation of a new language specifically for poetry than
he will to the exploitation of actual available social dialects."
288
language is never unitary
" It is
unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative
forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations
that fill it, and in isolation from the uninterrupted
process of historical becoming that is a characteristic of all
living language. Actual social life and historical becoming create
within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of
concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and
social belief systems; within these various systems (identical in
the abstract) are elements of language filled with various semantic
and axiological content and each with its own different sound.
288
genres for certain social functions
289
stratification? Connections?
290
"there is nevertheless always present, even here, a certain
degree of social differentiation, a social stratification, that in
other eras can become extremely acute. Social stratification may
here and there coincide with generic and professional stratification,
but in essence it is, of course, a thing completely autonomous
and peculiar to itself."
"Every socially significant verbal performance has the abilitysometimes
for a long period of time, and for a wide circle of persons-
to infect with its own intention certain aspects of language
that had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse,
imposing on them specific semantic nuances and specific axiological
overtones; thus, it can create slogan-words, curse-words,
praise-words and so forth."
291
Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language
is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of
socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the
past, between differing epochs of the past, between different
socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies,
schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These "languages"
of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways,
forming new socially typifying "languages
calls for different methodologies
292
"As
such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement
one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically.
As such they encounter one another and co-exist in the
consciousness of real people-first and foremost, in the creative
consciousness of people who write novels. As such, these languages
live a real life, they struggle and evolve in an environment
of social heter~~lossiTa.h erefore they are all able to enter into
the unitary plane of the novel, which can unite in itself parodic
stylizations of generic languages, various forms of stylizations
and illustrations of professional and period-bound languages, the
languages of particular generations, of social dialects and others
(as occurs, for example, in the English comic novel)."
no neutral terms
324
"Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the
forms for its incorporation), is another's speech in another's language,
serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted
way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse.
It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously
two different intentions: the direct intention of the
character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author
327
"If the novelist loses touch with this linguistic ground of prose
style, if he is unable to attain the heights of a relativized, Galilean
linguistic consciousness, if he is deaf to organic double-voicedness
and to the internal dialogization of living and evolving discourse,
then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual
possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre.
351
Issues of discourse in science
"Here, the significance of discourse as such is comparatively
weak. Mathematical and natural sciences do not acknowledge
discourse as a subject in its own right. In scientific activity
one must, of course, dcal with another's discourse-the
words of predecessors, the judgments of critics, majority opinion
and so forth; one must deal with various forms for transmitting
and interpreting another's word-struggle with an authoritative
discourse, overcoming influences, polemics, references, quotations
and so forth-but all this remains a mere operational necessity
and does not affect the subject matter itself of the science,
into whose composition the speaker and his discourse do not, of
course, enter. The entire methodological apparatus of the mathematical
and natural sciences is directed toward mastery over
mute objects, brute things, that do not reveal themselves in
words, that do not comment on themselves. Acquiring knowledge
here is not connected with receiving and interpreting words
or signs from the object itself under consideration."
378
"Style can
be defined as the fundamental and creative (triple] relationship of
discourse to its object, to the speaker himself and to another's
discourse; style strives organically to assimilate material into
language and language into material. Style cannot accommodate
anything that is in excess of this exposition, anything given, already
shaped, formed in words; style either permeates the object
directly and without any mediation, as in poetry, or refracts its
own intentions, as in literary prose (even the prose novelist does
not expound the speech of another, but rather constructs an artistic
image of it)."
416
move beyond stylistic analysis
"The more distant the work to be analyzed
is from contemporary consciousness, the more serious this
difficulty becomes. It is precisely in the most sharply heteroglot
eras, when the collision and interaction of languages is especially
intense and powerful, when heteroglossia washes over literary
language from all sides [that is, in precisely those eras that most
conduce to the novel) that aspects of heteroglossia are canonized
with great ease and rapidly pass from one language system to another:
from everyday life into literary language, from literary language
into the language of everyday, from professional jargon into
more general use, from one genre to another and so forth.
check text for terms (highlighted)
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