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 word, 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
