in the Modern Analysis of Novelistic Prose
Bakhtin’s Heteroglossia and its Place in the Modern Analysis of Novelistic Prose
In the King James Bible, the Gospel of John opens with the following words, “In the beginning was the Word.” The unquestionable immutability of the Word is emphasized in the text that follows – “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” While for Michail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and linguist, having just one meaning of the spoken words – whether in regular life or in novels – is something that signifies “the narrowness of this type of thinking and its inadequacy in all areas of discourse’s artistic life.” For him, ...