Dialogic criticism:
(From- A Glossary of Literary Terms- M. H. Abrams)
Dialogic criticism is modeled on the theory and critical procedures
of the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin who, although he published his major
works in the 1920s and 1930s, remained virtually unknown to the West until the
1980s, when translations of his writings gave him a wide and rapidly increasing
influence. To Bakhtin a literary work is not (as in various poststructural theories) a
text whose meanings are produced by the play of impersonal linguistic or economic
or cultural forces, but a site for the dialogic interaction of multiple voices,
or modes of discourse, each of which is not merely a verbal but a social phenomenon,
and as such is the product of manifold determinants that are specific to a
class, social group, and speech community. A person’s speech does not express a
pre-existent and autonomous individuality; instead, his or her character emerges in
the course of the dialogue and is composed of languages from diverse social contexts.
Each utterance, furthermore, whether in actual life or as represented in literature,
owes its precise inflection and meaning to a number of attendant factors—
the specific social situation in which it is spoken, the relation of its speaker to an
actual or anticipated listener, and the relation of the utterance to the prior utterances
to which it is (explicitly or implicitly) a response.
Bakhtin’s prime interest was in the novel, and especially in the ways that the
multiple voices that constitute the text of any novel disrupt the authority of the
author’s single voice. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929, trans. by Caryl
Emerson, 1984), he contrasts the monologic novels of writers such as Leo Tolstoy
—which undertake to subordinate the voices of all the characters to the authoritative
discourse and controlling purposes of the author—to the dialogic form (or “polyphonic
form”) of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels, in which the characters are liberated
to speak “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a
genuine polyphony of fully valid voices.” In Bakhtin’s view, however, a novel can
never be totally monologic, since the narrator’s reports of the utterances of another
character are inescapably “double-voiced” (in that we can distinguish therein the
author’s own accent and inflection), and also dialogic (in that the author’s discourse
continually reinforces, alters, or contests with the types of speech that it reports).
In Rabelais and His World (trans. 1984), Bakhtin proposed his widely cited
concept of the carnivalesque in certain works of literature. This literary mode
parallels the flouting of authority and temporary inversion of social hierarchies
that, in many cultures, are permitted during a season of carnival. The literary
work does so by introducing a mingling of voices from diverse social levels that
are free to mock and subvert authority, to flout social norms by ribaldry, and to exhibit various ways of profaning what is ordinarily regarded as sacrosanct.
Bakhtin traces the occurrence of the carnivalesque in ancient, medieval, and
Renaissance writers (especially in Rabelais); he also asserts that the mode recurs
later, especially in the play of irreverent, parodic, and subversive voices in the novels
of Dostoevsky—novels that are both dialogic and carnivalesque.
In an essay on “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35), Bakhtin develops his
view that the novel is constituted by a multiplicity of divergent and contending
social voices that achieve their full significance only in the process of their dialogic
interaction both with each other and with the voice of the narrator. Bakhtin explicitly
sets his theory against Aristotle’s Poetics, which proposed that the primary
component in narrative forms is a plot that evolves coherently from its beginning
to an end in which all complications are resolved (see plot). Instead, Bakhtin elevates
discourse (equivalent to Aristotle’s subordinate element of diction) into the primary
component of a narrative work; and he describes discourse as a medley of
voices, social attitudes, and values that are not only opposed, but irreconcilable,
with the result that the work remains unresolved and open-ended. Although he
wrote during the Stalinist regime in Russia, Bakhtin’s libertarian and open concept
of the literary narrative is obviously, although tacitly, opposed to the Soviet version
of Marxist criticism, which stresses the way a novel either reflects or distorts
the true social reality, or expresses only a single dominant ideology, or should exemplify
a “social realism” that accords with an authoritarian party line. See Marxist
criticism and, for a discussion of the complex issue of Bakhtin’s relation to Marxism
and Soviet literary criticism, see Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An
Introductory Reader (1995), pp. 8–21.
Bakhtin’s views have been, in some part and in diverse ways, incorporated by
representatives of various types of critical theory and practice, whether traditional
or poststructural. Among current students of literature, those who are identified specifically
as “dialogic critics” follow Bakhtin’s example by proposing that the primary
component in the constitution of narrative works, or of literature generally
—and of general culture as well—is a plurality of contending and mutually qualifying
social voices, with no possibility of a decisive resolution into a monologic
truth. Self-reflexively, a thoroughgoing dialogic critic, in accordance with
Bakhtin’s views, considers his own critical writings to be simply one voice among
many in the contention of critical theories and practices, which coexist in a sustained
tension of opposition and mutual definition. As Don Bialostosky, a chief
spokesman for dialogic criticism, voiced its rationale and ideal:
As a self-conscious practice, dialogic criticism turns its inescapable involvement
with some other voices into a program of articulating itself
with all the other voices of the discipline, the culture, or the world of
cultures to which it makes itself responsible. . . . Neither a live-andlet-live
relativism nor a settle-it-once-and-for-all authoritarianism but
a strenuous and open-ended dialogism would keep them talking to
themselves and to one another, discovering their affinities without
resting in them and clarifying their differences without resolving them.
(“Dialogic Criticism,” in G. Douglas Atkins and Laura Morrow, eds., Contemporary Literary
Theory, 1989, pp. 223–24)See the related critical enterprise called discourse analysis; and in addition to the
writings mentioned above, refer to Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, ed.
Michael Holquist (1981), and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (1986). For Bakhtin’s life and intellectual views,
with attention to the problem of identifying writings that Bakhtin published under
the names of various of his colleagues, see Katerina Clark and Michael
Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), and Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson,
Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Poetics (1990). An influential early exposition that
publicized Bakhtin’s ideas in the West was Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin:
The Dialogical Principle (1984). A later book describing the wide dissemination of
these ideas is David Lodge’s After Bakhtin (1990). For an application of dialogic
criticism, see Don H. Bialostosky, Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of
Criticism (1992). For a critical view of Bakhtin’s claims, see René Wellek, A
History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, Vol. 7 (1991), pp. 354–71.
For references to dialogic criticism in other entries, see pages 82, 282.Mikhail Bakhtin
Comments
Post a Comment