Dialogism

For those of you looking for more info on dialogism, here's a detailed blog post on the subject:

http://realmixed.blogspot.com/2009/04/digital-literature-bakhtin-and-dialogic.html

We'll unpack some of this material in class on Th.

Class Notes

Here's a representation of our class discussion today:

Heteroglossia: Meaning is never singular but plural in nature. The "right" meaning depends on context, and no two contexts are the same.

Dialogism: Language is interactive. Every meaning affects every other meaning.

Intertextuality: You drew a Cartesian plane (x/y axis). Along X, you drew the writer and the audience; along the Y, you drew "TIME," with old texts at one end and current texts at the other end.

The basic idea was that meaning is influenced by the writer and the audience as well as all of the texts that have come before and all the texts at are being produced in the here and now.

Dialogism and Heteroglossia

I thought you might find the definitions of Dialogism and Heteroglossia useful:

A Few Key Terms Regarding the Collaborative Nature of Interpretation

See Fontaine and Hunter, p 9 for a brief summary.

Heteroglossia:

“The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve" (Holquist 426).

Dialogism:

“Is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greaterwhole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of the utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be not actual monologues" (Holquist 428).

Bakhtin. M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Tras. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Austin Press, 1992.