Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin

Bakhtin introduces the idea of heteroglossia. Heteroglossia means many different tyoes of speech and languages. Different languages could include languages between professionals, trade, generation, and slang. When I think of trade language, I think about restaraunt language. As a server, I know that there are many words that someone who does not work in the restaurant buisness would not know. Bakhtin said that the novel is what ties all of these languages together in a way that works. It actually becomes a work of art. There is a good article about Bakhtin and his views at http://tinyurl.com/7d9h34h.

 

Bakhtin also discusses the term dialogical. He says that each and every word is already in a dialogue in which it already has a meaning surrounding it. It is hard to put our own meaning to it. Usually, people are never more than half successful at doing this. I never really thought about this until this class. It makes sense, though. Words are way older than we are, so there is really no way to use a word and be able to put only what we want to mean into it.