The Themes Of Language In William Rich's Bakhtin

Bakhtin conceptualizes language as dialogic. He does this in the sense that specific uses of language or ‘utterances’ contribute dynamically to meaning-making because they are embedded in socio-cultural and historical contexts. Importantly, language is looked at as a site of struggle envisaging individuals engaged in creating a sense of themselves against dominant forms of institutional expectations. These crucial understandings converge with the main tenet proposed by Critical discourse analysis (cf. Fairclough,1995; Kress and van Leeuwen,1996) who examine ideological basis of texts and their uses as media as political or social control, and the maintenance of power structure. In Bakhtinian approach all texts are viewed as “critical sites for the negotiation of power and ideology.” (Anne Burns 138)
Bakhtin particularly focuses on the discourse in the novel. In his view the novel does not consist in a single, unified form. The novel as genre subsumes several sub-genres. In Bakhtin’s own words the novel is “several heterogeneous stylistic unities.” (Bakhtin) Secondly, the novel is not monological. It does not express a single point of view that is to be of the author’s. The novel is dialogical or heteroglot. The novel expresses the multiplicity of points of view. In short, as Bakhtin puts it, the novel is “multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” (Bakhtin 261). These voices or perspectives include:
• the author’s own voice, so-called direct authorial