This interdisciplinary volume of collected, unpublished essays demonstrates the importance of the influential Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogic meaning for a wide range of textual problems. The book is organized around three interlocking dimensions of this dialogue: Part I delineates dialogic interactions between voices of a single text; Part II traces such exchanges on an intertextual level; and Part III locates both kinds of exchanges within the dialogue between speakers, authors, and readers. Within this framework, such distinguished scholars as Deborah Tannen, Shirley Brice Heath, and John Searle address questions including rhetorical models for the establishment and exercise of political power, intimacy and understanding in literary speech, polyphonic narrative forms, the relationship between conversational and literary discourse, and the issue of literature as social action. The essays argue for a redefinition of literary meaning - one that is communal, interactive, and vocatively created. They demonstrate that literary meaning is not rendered by a single narrator, nor even by a solitary author, but is incrementally constructed and exchanged.

About the Author
Michael Macovski is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University in New York. He is the author of Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (OUP, 1994), as well as articles on Emily Bronte, Lord Byron, and the history of publishing.

Reviews
The pentad of items in the title covers many bases, and so is at once impressive and defensive ... Every paper in the collection will be of interest to one kind of reader or another ... a valuable addition to discourse and Bakhtin studies. * Michael Toolan, Social Semiotics, Vol 9, No 3, 1999 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780195070637
Author Michael Macovski
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 614g
Dimensions(mm) 243mm * 164mm * 25mm