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Bakhtin's view of heteroglossia has been often employed in the context of the postmodern critique of the perceived teleological and authoritarian character of modernist art and culture. In particular, the latter's strong disdain for popular forms of art and literature — archetypically expressed in Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry — has been criticised as a proponent of monoglossia; practitioners of cultural studies have used Bakhtin's conceptual framework to theorise the critical reappropriation of mass-produced entertainment forms by the public.
Dorothy Hale applied the concept of heteroglossia to African-American literature in "Bakhtin in African American Literary Theory," pointing to a slave narrator remembering his bondage or the racial narrative of the blues as distinctly African-American voices that come into conflict with other dialects. In Hale's view, heteroglossia is similar to W. E. B. Dubois' view of the African American double consciousness, torn between the American experience and African heritage. African American literature, by nature, contains a powerful and persistent heteroglossia. To Hale this is not simply a literary technique but a sign of African-American linguistic identity.
Hale criticizes Dubois for limiting double consciousness to African-Americans alone, identifying African-American double consciousness as a special case of universal heteroglossia, and comparing the plight of the African-American to Bakhtin's hypothetical peasant. To Hale, the fact that heteroglossia is a social construction offers hope for equality to African-Americans because it implies that they are different and inequal only because society makes them so, rather than because of any inherent trait.
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heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single linguistic code. The term translates the Russian разноречие [raznorechie] (literally "different-speech-ness"), which was introduced by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Слово в романе [Slovo v romane], published in English as "Discourse in the Novel."
Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel originates in the coexistence of, and conflict between, different types of speech: the speech of characters, the speech of narrators, and even the speech of the author. He defines heteroglossia as "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way." It is important to note that Bakhtin identifies the direct narrative of the author, rather than dialogue between characters, as the primary location of this conflict.
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Extending his argument, Bakhtin proposes that all languages represent a distinct point of view on the world, characterized by its own meaning and values. In this view, language is "shot through with intentions and accents," and thus there are no neutral words. Even the most unremarkable statement possesses a taste, whether of a profession, a party, a generation, a place or a time. To Bakhtin, words do not exist until they are spoken, and that moment they are printed with the signature of the speaker.
Bakhtin identifies the act of speech, or of writing, as a literary-verbal performance, one that requires the speaker or author to take a position, even if only by choosing the dialect that they will speak in. Separate languages are often identified with separate circumstances. Bakhtin gives the example of an illiterate peasant, who speaks Church Slavonic to God, speaks to his family in their own peculiar dialect, sings songs in yet a third, and attempts to emulate officious high-class dialect when he dictates petitions to the local government. The prose writer, Bakhtin argues, must welcome and incorporate these many languages into his work.
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