Dialogism and Heteroglossia

From the 1920s through the 1940s the Russian literary theoretician and philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) developed a group of concepts bearing on the analysis of language in literature that have proved influential on Anglo‐American and European scholarship, especially during the 1980s and ‘90s. Of these concepts, the one with the widest implications is dialogizm , generally rendered into English as “dialogism”; it is most fully developed in the first collection of Bakhtin's writings to be translated into English under the title The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1981 [1975]). For Bakhtin, the basic condition of human communication is “heteroglossia,” the simultaneous presence of competing languages and their social, historical, psychological, and physical conditions of utterance. This insures that any statement will have a unique meaning dependent upon its immediate and global context. Under the condition of heteroglossia, dialogism is the necessary and characteristic mode of the production of meaning; both speech and writing, seen in this light, are always dialogical. We might also say that in a world dominated by heteroglossia, which insures the primacy of context over text, dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode.