Dialogic Narrative (Mikhail Bahktin)
All Words Taste of a Place and Time
"All words have the 'taste' of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which is has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions" (293).
Language is Overpopulated with Intentions
"Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intention; it is populated--overpopulated--with the intentions of others" (294).
The Novel as a Playing Field (Space)
[T]he novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages into contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving-out of a living image of another language" (361)
The Novel as a Prism Refracting the Author's Intention
"...[T]he intention of the author, refracted as its passes through [the novel's stratification of language]..., does not wholly give itself up to any of them. It is as if the author has no language of his own, but does possess his own style, his own organized and unitary law governing the way he plays with languages and the way his own real semantic and expressive intentions are refracted within them" (311).
Work Cited
Bahktin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas, 1981.
See Also:The Wizard of Oz and Dialgocial Meaning (Salman Rushdie)
