Re: How do YOU read?

BPenuel who-is-at aol.com
Fri, 22 Dec 1995 21:34:13 -0500

Barbara's comments on the usefulness of the univocal/dialogic distinction I
think are actually in line with Bakhtin's own
"double" use of this distinction.

In one framework, "dialogicality" characterizes all discourse. In that
sense, every utterance is taken to be dialogic from the start, whether or not
this dialogicality may be inferred in the intention of the author or the
intention that might be imputed in the activity of text production.
Dialogic, then, is an _analytic_ term, that is used as a tool for analyzing
discourse. The questions here are "Who is Speaking? And to Whom?"

In another use of the term, Bakhtin does characterize some texts as more or
less "dialogic" or, as he sometimes calls texts, "double-voiced." Here, I
think, Bakhtin is centrally involved in the issue of intentionality--but in
the way it is constructed intertextually by authors as responses to present
or absent voices from the local context.

The two uses of "dialogic" here I think point to a distinction between an
_analytic_ view of the term and a more or less _normative_ (concerned with
ideal forms of dialogue) view of dialogicality. In the former, dialogue is
assumed, and univocality does not appear. In the latter, univocality is
invoked as a more "centripetal" form of discourse, of which Bakhtin was a
little more suspicious as the sole measure of a text's value.

Bill Penuel
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