The Dialogic Imagination

“T he word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder with it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way” (279). 
                                  - Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin

For Bakhtin, texts do not exist ‘in themselves,’ but only in their relations to other texts. Poetry, for example, is traditionally monologic, due to the fact that the poet “endured in the process of creation, in the finished work language is an obedient organ, fully adequate to the author’s intention” (Bakhtin, 286). Monologism therefore encloses the created world and pretends to be the ultimate world. However every piece of art remains to inclose another piece of art may it an allusion or a text, a phrase, a clip of newspaper, photography or a word. Be aware of the dialogue while reading !


those who wish to include this theory in their MA studies can watch Slavic literary scholar Michael Holquist for a lecture entitled “On a Footnote in Bakhtin.”