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Bakhtin, Polyphony, HeteroglossiaI found the summation of heteroglossia, as well as its
relationship to other key Bakhtinian terms, by Karine Zbinden in
"Traducing Bakhtin and Missing Heteroglossia," in Dialogism 2,
both succinct and clear. In this passage she is summarizing from
"Discourse in the NoVel' (DN, pp.84-86 R; pp.96-98 f;pp.271-73
E).
... a professor ... insists that heteroglossia is
roughly (entirely) synonymous with the post-structuralist
concept of discourse. This article explains how such
'missreadings' can occur.
"Bakhtin begins his argument about centripetal
and centrifugal forces with a few historical observations: he
interprets the efforts towards the unification of the national
languages in Europe, be they the various poetics, Leibniz's
universal grammar or Humboldt's ideologism, as instances of
centripetal forces. Bakhtin details the diverse ways in which
other 'dialects' have been suppressed. He goes on to explain
that centripetal and centrifugal forces are at work within a
single natural language as well. In fact the situation within
one natural language is comparable to and can be represented by
the fight between the various 'dialects' or languages in a
polylingual society. Thus as single natural language is not only
stratified into dialects proper but into 'social-ideological'
languages. This heretogeneity of natural language is
heteroglossia. Heteroglossia thus accounts for both the common
social nature of language as a shared code and for the
individual appropriation of language in use. The notion of
speech genre as a further development of the concept of
heteroglossia introduces the idea of stability in language. This
prevents the post-structuralist drift of a subject which speaks
itself into self-annihilation, which is the back-cloth of an
intertextual conception of language" (51).
Pam Morris's "The Bakhtin Reader" (1994) provides a wonderful
glossary of terms (pp. 245-52). Here's Morris's definition of
"heteroglossia":
For Bakhtin, discourse always articulates a particular view of
the world. According to Bakhtin, earliest societies were
characterized by "monoglossia," or a stable, unified language.
"Polyglossia" refers to the simultaneity of two or more national
langauges in the same society, a phenomenon which developed, as
Bakhtin points out, in ancient Rome and during the Renaissance.
"Heteroglossia" (the Russian "raznorechie" literally means
"different-speech-ness"), refers to the conflict between
"centripetal" and "centrifugal," "official" and "unofficial"
discourses within the same national language. "Heteroglossia" is
also present, however at the (q.v.) mirco-linguistic scale;
every utterance contains within it the trace of other
utterances, both in the past and in the future. The discursive
site in which the conflict between different voices is at its
most concentrated is the modern novel (q.v.). One way of
representing heteroglossia in the novel is by a hybrid
construction, which contains within it the trace of two or more
discourses, either those of the narrator and character(s), or of
different characters (q.v. "quasi-direct discourse").
"Heteroglossia" should not be confused with "polyphony." The
latter term is used by Bakhtin primarily to describe
Dostoevsky's multi-voiced" novels, whereby author's and heroes'
discourses interact on equal terms. "Heteroglossia," on the
other hand, foregrounds the clash of antagonistic social foces
(pp. 248-49).
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