ABSTRACT
Mikhail Bakhtin establishes his concept of the dialogic imagination through a eontrastive analysis of epic and novel genres. Most of those who do the research on collaboration seem either to imply or explicitly describe a definition of literacy that assumes a one-dimensional relationship among group work, conversational dialogue, and written texts, with ongoing classroom conversations gradually and naturally evolving into either individual or group texts. To Bakhtin the epic had become by the classical period a static genre, always set in the past, sure of its heroes and its perspectives on heroic action. Somehow, readers of modern novels must learn to be receptive to many dialects and voices in the texts they read, must learn as well to hear one voice and interpret its meaning with another, must learn, ultimately, to turn the novel's "inter-animation of languages," its "laughter," and its "polyglossia" into dialogic responses of their own.
