Bakhtin's Dialogism

In the careful analyses of the artistry of the text, the author of the text has been pronounced dead.

There is a growing interest among scholars to bridge the gap between historical and literaryapproaches. The perceived rift between the two approaches may be much more apparent than real. While historical critics emphasize more on the historical aspects of their work, the literary critics stress more on non-historical characters. Therefore, each method tries to fill the gap in the given text. According toMax Turner, different kinds of writing in the Bible call for different methods. Turner appreciates historical, literary, and reader-response approaches since all these could be used for a rich interpretation of biblical texts. M.C De Boer

They utilize Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism approach, which suggests that in a polyphonic novel there is no one dominant voice rather all voices have important value as they interact with each other. Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a philosopher, literary scholar, and a radical Soviet thinker. He lived in polyglot cities and was brought up in a Russian Orthodox Christianity. His circle of friends embraced a new thinking that is away from conventional norms. He was exiled for his unconventional thoughts. His literary theories such as dialogism, heteroglossia, and polyphony are widely used in linguistic and biblical studies. The impact of Bakhtin’s literary theories is very much felt both in the western world as well as in Asia.In his, Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky’s works are polyphonic or polysubjective in which each voice is unique and on par with others. Bakhtin writes, “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels.” For Bakhtin, each voice in Dostoevsky’s novel is autonomous with “equal rights and each with its own world, combine(d) but are not merged in the unity of the event.” Thus in a polyphonic novel, many voices are combined but they remain independent. “The artistic will of polyphony is a will to combine many wills, a will to the event.” Thus there is a higher unity in polyphony, a unity of the event where autonomous voices are in dialogue with each