ABSTRACT
The recent history explains Mikhail Bakhtin's curious polarisation of novelistic and poetic discourse. The historical significance of the novel, Bakhtin is not primarily, even in his writings about literature, a theorist of narrative, in the sense that Gerard Genette and Seymour Chatman are. His key concepts, such as dialogism, heteroglossia and carnival, are most characteristically manifested in the novel, but are crucially features of social reality. There is nevertheless an inherent relationship between Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and narrative. Bakhtin's theory of language is fundamentally one of conflict, and his own characteristic style narrativises the processes of discourse itself: The word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse.
