Dialogic Criticism (1920-30's)

 

Dialogic Criticism (1920-30's)

(useful for NET/SET/JL/DL/Other competetive exams)

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Introduction:

 

Ø Dialogic criticism is a method of understanding literature that draws meaning from the interplay of several disparate voices.

Ø It is Mikhael Mikhailovich Bakhtin's concept (Russian Philosopher), especially in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

Ø Bakhtin Contrasts between monologic, and dialogic works of literature. (He preferred Dialogic form)

Ø Dialogic works carries a continuous dialogue with other works of Literature are Other authors (Communication with multiple voices)

Ø They say not only literature, language indeed all thought appears as dialogic.

Ø We don't speak in a vacuum.

Ø He elevates discourse (equivalent to Aristotle's Diction) as a primary component of narrative and medly of voices, social attitudes and values

Ø Bakhtin says novel is constituted by multiple voices and divergent in dialogic form in his essay Discourse in the novel (1934- 35)

Ø His prime interest is novels,

Ø He says novel as a polyphonic genre (used polyphony as synonym for dialogism)

 

Key words:

Chronotype:

Ø Configurations of time and space in language and discourse.

Ø Coined by Bakhtin in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel (1937–38)”

Polyphony:

Ø Borrowed from music (=Many voices)

Ø Many characters in a work of different perspectives

Ø Used in “Problems in Dostovsky’s Poetics (1929)”

Carnivalesque:

Ø Carnival is known as feast of fools.

Ø It is a literary mode paralleled on flouting authority as in inversion of social hierarchies that, in many cultures, in a season of carnival.

Ø introducing a mingled of voices from diverse social levels  

Ø occurrence of this concept in ancient, medieval and renaissance writers (especially Rabelias)

Ø coined this in Bakhtin’s "Rabelais & his world (1966)”

Unfinalizability:-

Ø Person is never revealed (or) fully known in the world.

Grotesque Realism-

Ø term coined by Bakhtin

Ø degradation or lowering of abstract, spiritual, ideal & noble to the material level.

Ø use of body when talking about grotesque

Ø used in "Rebelias & folk culture’’ book

Ø Cultural values of body is questioned in his essay "Author & Hero"

Heteroglossia:

Ø =variety of voices and languages used in a novel.

Ø linguistic variety as an aspect of social conflict, as in tensions between central and marginal uses of the same national language

Ø Any work contains multiple viewpoints.

Ø Author’s job is to assemble these divergent points of view into a single narrative.

Ø The term appears in Bakhtin’s “Dialogic Imagination: 4 essays”, as an equivalent for his Russian term raznorechie (‘differentspeechness’).

Monologic Vs Dialogic        

Ø Sees the works of Tolstoy' as monologic and the works of Dostoevsky as Dialogic.

Ø He prefers Dostoevsky over Tolstoy.

Ø In “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse (1940)” Bakhtin says, “Every novel is a dialogized system made up of images of language, style and consciousness”

Double Word-

Ø Every word has 2 meanings

Ø Monologic (or) literal meaning: (in dictionary)

Ø Dialogic (or) implied meaning; (in social phenomena)

Ø Ex: she is very smart.

Ø In Monologic, smart= Beauty;

Ø In Dialogic, smart=clever

 

Works of Bakhtin:

Ø Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929): There are 5 chapters, and a brief preface ("From the Author") and Conclusion.

Ø Rabelais & his world (1966)

Ø The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1975). The essays are:

1. "Epic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel (1941);

2. "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" (1940);

3. "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937–38);

4. "Discourse in the Novel" (1934).

François Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He is primarily known as a writer of satire, of the grotesque, and of bawdy jokes and songs. Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnivalesque and grotesque body are from the world of Rabelais

 

Influences

Ø Julia Kristeva (in 1970s-80's)- rediscovered Bakhtin through the concepts of Intertextuality

Ø DH Lawrence anticipated Bakhtin in his “After Bakhtin" (1990)