ABSTRACT
In "Word, Dialogue and Novel," Julia Kristeva heralds Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of dialogue, carnival and intertextuality as the means by which power through language can best be described. In adapting Bakhtin's work to feminist ends, Kristeva allies feminism with carnivalistic and subversive linguistic tendencies. In her reading of Bakhtin, Kristeva equates authoritative discourse with "God, 'History,' Monologism, Aristotelian logic, System, Narrative". Bakhtin posits in contrast to authoritative discourse a resistant form of discourse—what he refers to as the "internally persuasive". Robert Scholes, in Protocols of Reading, presents two forms of reading that coincide with Bakhtin's concepts of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and uses "centripetal" and "centrifugal" to characterize the two forms. Bakhtin proposes a dominant, hegemonic, monologic, centripetal discourse confronted by a marginalized, heterologic, dialogic, centrifugal discourse. The concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and carnival all seemed appropriate and valuable to writing instruction in the academy.
