Dialogic Discourse
Dialogic Discourse In "Dialogics as an Art of Discourse in Literary Criticism" (101 [1986]: 788-97) Don H. Bialostosky attempts to convert Bakhtin's theory of dialogic discourse into a practice of literary criticism. Bialostosky's argument is based on an undisciplined interpretation of Bakhtin's terms and a mistaken definition of Aristotle's terms. Were the effort he proposes made in good faith, it would eventuate not in a changed mode of critical discourse but in discourse about critics rather than about literature. Were it made in bad faith, it would encourage an illusive writing that conceals its premises while using that illusiveness as a rhetorical strategy. Bakhtin uses the concept of the dialogic imagination in two senses, the first having to do with the novel's mimesis of the tension between individuals' sense of autonomy and the multiplicity of their interconnections within the social nexus that permits their discou...