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"This interdisciplinary volume of collected, unpublished essays demonstrates the importance of the influential Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogic meaning for a wide range of textual problems. The book is organized around three interlocking dimensions of this dialogue: Part I delineates dialogic interactions between voices of a single text; Part II traces such exchanges on an intertextual level; and Part III locates both kinds of exchanges within the dialogue between speakers, authors, and readers. Within this framework, such distinguished scholars as Deborah Tannen, Shirley Brice Heath, and John Searle address questions including rhetorical models for the establishment and exercise of political power, intimacy and understanding in literary speech, polyphonic narrative forms, the relationship between conversational and literary discourse, and the issue of literature as social action. The essays argue for a redefinition of literary meaning - one that is communal, interactive, and vocatively created. They demonstrate that literary meaning is not rendered by a single narrator, nor even by a solitary author, but is incrementally constructed and exchanged."@en
"This interdisciplinary collection brings together essays by leading Bakhtin critics along with chapters by eminent scholars who have developed and extended Bakhtin's concept of dialogue. The volume presents a cross-section of recent dialogic approaches within literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies - and extrapolates these approaches to such fields as social history, discourse analysis, and anthropology. Dialogue is understood not only as an exchange among intratextual voices, but also as an extratextual interplay of historical influences, oral forms, and cultural heuristics. Throughout the volume, the concept of dialogue invokes a range of interrelated concerns: historical issues involving national politics, English topography, and the British public sphere; theoretical issues concerning cultural relativity, Russian formalism, and speech-act theory; critical issues elaborating Marxist, historicist, and dialogic literary criticism; generic issues delimiting the lyric, novel, and essay; and linguistic issues concerning the relation between literary dialogue, everyday conversation, and other spoken forms. The contributors address such varied topics as rhetorical models for the establishment and exercise of political power, the relation between spoken and written discourse, and the idea of literature as social action. These essays, taken together, argue for a redefinition of literary meaning - one that is communal, interactive, and vocatively created."