Bakhtin conceptualizes language as dialogic. He does this in the sense that specific uses of language or ‘utterances’ contribute dynamically to meaning-making because they are embedded in socio-cultural and historical contexts. Importantly, language is looked at as a site of struggle envisaging individuals engaged in creating a sense of themselves against dominant forms of institutional expectations. These crucial understandings converge with the main tenet proposed by Critical discourse analysis (cf. Fairclough,1995; Kress and van Leeuwen,1996) who examine ideological basis of texts and their uses as media as political or social control, and the maintenance of power structure. In Bakhtinian approach all texts are viewed as “critical sites …show more content…
In his view the novel does not consist in a single, unified form. The novel as genre subsumes several sub-genres. In Bakhtin’s own words the novel is “several heterogeneous stylistic unities.” (Bakhtin) Secondly, the novel is not monological. It does not express a single point of view that is to be of the author’s. The novel is dialogical or heteroglot. The novel expresses the multiplicity of points of view. In short, as Bakhtin puts it, the novel is “multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” (Bakhtin 261). These voices or perspectives include: • the author’s own voice, so-called direct authorial interventions (these are passages in which the author’s own voice can be clearly heard commenting upon the action or articulating some moral sentiment that may have little to do with the progression of the plot itself); • the narrator’s voice (usually following a particular literary style or …show more content…
. . overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped . . . by the ‘light’ of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex inter relationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile.” (Bakhtin
Miner describes this practice to “strike the uninitiated stranger as revolting” (504). His opinion causes confusion and leads readers to think as the author’s intention. Miner’s choice of words demonstrates how language can shape people’s impression of a culture.
Munnecke consistently uses the term “linguistic shell” to ensure that the reader becomes aware of his meaning for that term. While “linguistic shell” is a phrase that Munnecke created himself to describe the way that he was feeling, his repetition familiarizes the reader with those same thoughts. Although Munnecke originally stated that he saw his “linguistic shell with great ambivalence” he later said “travelling to Japan jolted [him] into understanding the “nothings” outside [his] Western linguistic shell.” (428) The reader is able to understand that journey due to the repetition of the same phrase. At the brink of his realization, Munnecke says “...the emptiness of the space the flower framed was connected to the emptiness of my linguistic shell. Words created negative space, but we were blind to it. Words were sitting, reality was flowing.” (Munnecke 424) In this quote Munnecke once again uses repetition of the terms “reality” and “linguistic shells.” (424) His consistency in using these words exhibits their importance within this memoir.This quote reinforces my motive for presuming that repetition was a significant rhetorical choice for
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford, 2011. Print.
Bakhtin believes that culture is represented and shaped by language. Language is a living and dyadic force that always expects a response. The novel is structured as a dialogue made up of a variety of different voices coexisting and competing to make meaning in the interaction and interstices of the voices and words in the text.# According to Bakhtin#, the novel is made up of a variety of different speech styles and voices. The novel expresses its views through the interaction between the different voices. These voices include the stories of the individual characters, the images presented and interpreted through the novel, the cultural and social forces at work in the novel and between the force and meaning of the individual words used as well as the symbolic imagery created. Meaning in the novel takes place not only in the interaction between the dialogues but also in the spaces created between the dialogues.
Alienated feelings can be caused or seen in any medium. The texts which deal with the theme as a result have widely differing content, though they don’t detract from efficient portrayal depending on how it is written. The human identity, first person, vernacular, & job description when compared to the formal, distanced language of Stewart’s work makes it apparent, what is effective when applying it to the emotion & senses. As much as fact can be effective in demonstrating evocative language, when the language is emotional in using evocative language the mastery is undeniable.
Bataille suggests the use of cultural theory to attack and analyse language. Therefore, the characteristic theme
There seems to be an air of paradox in bringing a theory on the novel as a genre and the most famous Anglo-American modernist poet as a whole. Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal study of ‘Discourse in the Novel’, written in 1934-35, and finally appearing in English translation in 1981, offers us an account of the difference between ‘poetic discourse’ and ‘novelistic discourse’. The division is not strictly a difference in to the novel and the poetry as genres. Often with Bakhtin we find that the novel assimilates all genres including poetry which he himself calls the process of “incorporated genres” as one of the main features of the novel. Bakhtin also opines that even non-narrative poetry can possess a degree of ‘dialogism’ for which he rates the novel so highly. Among his instances of dialogised verse as the lyrical poetry of Jules Laforgue, who exercised a great deal of influence on T S Eliot, and of Francois Villon who was extolled as poetic model by Ezra Pound.
Ross, Steven M. ""Voice" in Narrative Texts: The Example of As I Lay Dying." PMLA94.2 (1979): 300-10. JSTOR. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
Traditional definitions of language have often categorised creative activity in the ‘canonical’ literary uses we see in artistic works. However, contemporary definitions no longer confine creativity with language to the work of the novelist or poet. It is a well argued point that the seeds of such literary language reside in what may be described, as the mundane, practical uses of ‘everyday’ talk and writing. This shift in opinion and approach to language study may be largely attributed to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who developed a social theory of language. Bakhtin’s main argument was that there should not be a special category in which to place literary language, as different and superior to the everyday, but that “literature was just one set of genres out of the wide range of different speech genres within social life” (Maybin, 2006, p.418). Bakhtin’s concern was not with the formal properties of language alone, but also in the recognition of the many genres of language, how it works and how it is affected by social, cultural and historical factors. (2006)
In The English Novel an Introduction, Terry Eagleton states while a novel is a “piece of prose fiction of reasonable length,” it is also contradictory to call it so, because not all novels are written in prose nor is there an exact definition of what is to be considered “reasonable length.” Eagleton goes on to state that the genre is void of an exact definition. He describes it as a “mighty melting pot” and a “mongrel among literary thoroughbreds (Eagleton 1).”
Literature is one of the most openended types of human communication. Readers know that they are anonymous and free of the judgement or attack of the author. Therefore the reader is at liberty to experience the ideas of the author in an unadulterated way. Through this venue authors explore the opposite of their art, non-communication. Bechdel, Albee, and Davis explore how capitalism supplants relationships, this in turn is manifested in speech. All communication is rooted in community. As relationships become periphery to work and commodity, language becomes degraded. Language is not a simple system of one to one signification. All communication and languge is dependent on human relationships.
Her approach is capable of identifying and describing the underlying mechanisms that contribute to those disorders in discourse which are embedded in a particular context, at a specific moment, and inevitably affect communication. Wodak’s work on the discourse of anti-Semitism in 1990 led to the development of an approach she termed the Discourse-Historical Method. The term historical occupies a unique place in this approach. It denotes an attempt to systematically integrate all available background information in the analysis and interpretation of the many layers of a written or spoken text. As a result, the study of Wodak and her colleagues’ showed that the context of the discourse had a significant impact on the structure, function, and context of the utterances. This method is based on the belief that language “manifests social processes and interaction” and generates those processes as well (Wodak & Ludwig, 1999, p. 12). This method analyses language from a three-fold perspective: first, the assumption that discourse involves power and ideologies. “No interaction exists where power relations do not prevail and where values and norms do not have a relevant role” (p. 12). Secondly, “discourse … is always historical, that is, it is connected synchronically and diachronically with other communicative events which are happening at the same time or which have happened before” (p. 12). The third feature
At the surface level language seems to be simply a system of sentences, set of patterns or a fixed set of rules. However, language is not always transparent and innocent the way it seems. The real operation or practice of language results in discourse which generates power. To put it simply, discourses are manipulative use of language that shapes our views, ideas and opinions. It establishes and naturalizes certain norms of behavior, conduct, etc., which are unquestionable. As Pramod K Nayar echoes Foucault’s notion that certain authorities in the society “constructed, organized, shared and used” knowledge “through particular forms of speech, writing and language – or what is called discourse” (From Structuralism 35) in order to control a particular
There are certain components that a novel should contain. George Phelps has come up with a six-part basis for identifying novels: the writing must be fictitious, or in other words "not pretend to tell the truth," have a certain length, attain a unity of "plot, theme, tone, atmosphere, or vision," create an illusion of reality, be concerned with character, and be prose (Phelps 7-8). Kettle, in his An Introduction to the English Novel, argues a novel must have two elements -- a quality of life and a significant pattern (13).
The individual’s response to literature plays a vital role in the discussion of genre, for literary texts are created for an audience of one. The various means to discuss genre provide insightful observations; however, significant problems are inherent in these discussions. The constantly changing categories of genre and the emergence of new literary works make defining genre a daunting task better left to the individual reader.