Socratic Dialogue By Mikhail Bakhtin

In Western tradition, Socrates frequently employed a method of dialogue in argumentation, which allowed dramatic clash of juxtaposed points of view punctuated by the final word of a single person (interlocutor); and that mode of interaction came to acquire after him the name "Socratic dialogue". His disciple Plato further developed this many-voiced mode in writing, also known as Platonic dialogue; the master piece of which we have in the Republic, manifesting outstanding success of the mode. The ancient practice attracted the attention of Russian formalist and genre theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, and he used the concept while theorizing his views on the stylistic mode of the new novelistic (artistic-prose) genres vis-à-vis high poetic genres (epic, …show more content…
Bakhtin holds this 'monologic' view of language as inadequate to analyse the dynamics of the novelistic discourse. For adequate study of the genre novel he underscores the need of a "Sociological stylistics", which can simultaneously address "the daily ideological activities of social life" and fundamental dialogism and heteroglossia of living language (Leitch 1073-74) in literary and non-literary discourses. In his earlier formulation from 1919 to 1923 Bakhtin visualizes art and life as unified in subject. The unified subject is the space where the two realms of art and life get interpenetrated and so connected with each other in terms of a dialogic (or double-voiced) relationship, although "human being usually keeps these two modes of being separate" (Lane …show more content…
Such discourse foregrounds the fact that every common unitary language at every moment of its linguistic life has to encounter opposition or resistance by the realities of heteroglossia (1084); the verbal idealogical world is, therefore, subject to centrifugal forces of language, which focus on language plurality. In other words, "the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a 'unitary language', operate in the midst of heteroglossia". (1085)
Moreover, a novelistic discourse "participate[s] in actual heteroglossia and multi-languagedness" and in its vision tend towards "the decentralizing tendencies in the life of language by manifesting "polyglot consciousness" (1087). Language is a stratified system; its various strata comprise linguistic dialects, socio-ideological languages, such as languages of social groups, 'professional' and 'generic' languages, languages of generations, and so on (1085). Viewed from this angle, literary language is one of the variants of any heteroglot