M. Bakhtin "Discourse in the novel"

In this essay Bakhtin focuses on the question of literary forms or genres as examples of dialogic form. He focuses particularly on the contrast between poetry and novels. He says that poetry, historically, has always been the privileged form. Bakhtin begins his essay by posing a problem: if poetry is the more privileged literary form in Western culture (and in structuralist and poststructuralist theory), then what can you say about how discourse operates in novels? Clearly language operates differently, or is used differently, in fiction and in prose than in poetry; these genres have a different conception of how meaning is created than does poetry.
One answer to this question is that you can not or should not talk about novels at all. From this perspective, any prose discourse, and any form of fiction, is part of the effort to make language stable, unitary, and determinant. From another perspective, however, there is no comparison between novels and poetry. Poetry is meant to be an art form; fiction, on the other hand, is a kind of rhetoric, a literary form meant to persuade or to present an argument, not to produce an aesthetic effect.
Bakhtin starts with this division between poetry and prose fiction, and their social functions. He says that rhetoric has always been subordinated (in Western culture) to poetry, because rhetoric has a social purpose. Poetry has always functioned almost exclusively on an aesthetic level.
Because it does something, Bakhtin says, fiction, as a subset of rhetoric, has positive qualities. First of all, it is a socially...

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