Wednesday, 28 November 2018

M. M. Bakhtin (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (Trs.) Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin & London: University of Texas Press.


Introduction - Michael Holquist



Heteroglossia is Bakhtin’s way of referring, in any utterance of any kind, to the peculiar interaction between the two fundamentals of communication. On the one hand, a mode of transcription must, in order to do its work of separating out texts, be a more or less fixed system. – 12



Epic and Novel



Towards the Methodology for the Study of the Novel



the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted. – 19



Studying other genres is analogous to studying dead languages; studying the novel, on the other hand, is like studying languages that are not only alive, but still young. – 19



This ability (of parodying itself) of the novel to criticize itself is a remarkable feature of this ever-developing genre. – 20



the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality. – 20



three basic characteristics that fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres: (1) its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with multilanguage consciousness realized in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, the zone of maximal contact with the present in all its openendedness. – 21



The epic as a genre in its own right may, for our purposes, be characterized by three constitutive features: (1) a national epic past – in Goethe’s and Schiller’s terminology the “absolute past” – serves as the subject for the epic; (2) national tradition serves as the source for the epic; (3) an absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality, that is, from the time in which the singer lives. -21



When the novel becomes the dominant genre, epistemology becomes the dominant discipline. – 22



From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse



Five different stylistic approaches to novelistic discourse may be observed:



1. the author’s portions alone in the novel are analyzed.

2. a neutral linguistic description of the novelist’s language

3. in a given novelist’s language, elements characteristic of his particular literary tendency are isolated

4. language is analyzed as the individual style of the given novelist

5. Novel’s devices are analyzed from the point of view of their effectiveness as rhetoric. – 30



One’s own language is never a single language: in it there are always survivals of the past and a potential for other languagedness that is more or less sharply perceived by the working literary and language consciousness. – 37



Expressing Time and Space in Novels (Chronotope)



ii. Apuleius and Petronius (Adventure-everyday novel)



·         Adventure novel of everyday life

i. The satyricon of Petronius

ii. The Golden Ass of Apuleius

·         The features are found in satire and Hellenistic diatribe, as well as works from Christian literature on the lives of saints



Characteristics



-          Mix of adventure-time and everyday-time; emergence of new type of adventure-time distinct from Greek adventure-time

-          Metamorphosis (development of the idea of metamorphosis)



iii. Ancient Biography or Autobiography



Passes through the course of a whole life.



iv. The problem of Historical Inversion and Folkloric Chronotope



v. Chivalric Romance



vi. The Function of the Rougue, Clown and Fool in the Novel



vii. The Rabelaisian Chronotope



viii. The Folkloric Bases of the Rabeliasian Chronotope



ix. The Idyllic Chronotope in the Novel



x. Concluding Remark



A literary work’s artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is defined by its chronotope. – 93



Discourse in the Novel



Modern Stylistics & the Novel



Discourse in Poetry and Discourse in the Novel



the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the wrd, and make it one’s own. – 108



Heteroglossia in the Novel



The Speaking person in the Novel



The speaking person in the novel is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologemes. A particular language in a novel is always a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for a social significance. – 121



What is hybridization? It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousness, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor. – 129



The two Stylistic Lines of Development in the European Novel

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