Discourse in the Novel

1392 Words6 Pages
DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL Mikhail M. Bakhtin, the great Russian literary thinker, is an opponent of formalism. He viewed literature as a sacred text embodying human wisdom and regarded criticism as a way of unlocking some of this wisdom. Bakhtin is best known for his theories of the novel. Bakhtin’s theories concentrate on carnivalesque, heteroglossia, hybridization, chronotope and dialogism. According to him, novel is polyphonic; it represents the fundamental meaning through the form rather than the obliquely expressed ideology. In “Discourse in the Novel”, Bakhtin discusses theory of the novel which deals with heteroglossia. In real life and in literary works we have oral and written forms of language. Within the scope of literary language, there is already a sharply defined boundary between everyday conversational language and written language. The novel can be defined as a diversity of speech types and a diversity of individual voices artistically organized. Novel includes dialects, languages of different social groups, professional and genetic languages, languages of generations and so on. Novels draw on an aspect of language which Bakhtin calls “heteroglossia”. At any given time, members of any culture speak a multitude of languages. By this Bakhtin means forms of speech shaped by specific set of values, assumptions and purposes. So, there may be the professional language of the lawyer, the doctor, the business man, the politician, the teacher and so on; of teenagers and other age group; of various ethnic, urban and countless other kinds of communities. Dialects are only small parts of such languages which reflect different understanding of life. Novels bring different ‘languages of heterglossia’ into dialogic interaction. This dialogized heteroglossia is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel. The novel carefully arranges
Open Document