The Monologic Imagination
Matt Tomlinson and Julian Millie
Abstract
The pioneering and hugely influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin has led scholars in recent decades to see all discourse and social life as inherently “dialogical.” No speaker speaks alone because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and future. Moreover, we never fashion ourselves entirely by ourselves but always do so in concert with others. Bakhtin thus decisively reshaped modern understandings of language and subjectivity. And yet, the contributors to this volume argue that something is potentially overlooked with too close a focus on dialogism: many speake ... More
The pioneering and hugely influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin has led scholars in recent decades to see all discourse and social life as inherently “dialogical.” No speaker speaks alone because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and future. Moreover, we never fashion ourselves entirely by ourselves but always do so in concert with others. Bakhtin thus decisively reshaped modern understandings of language and subjectivity. And yet, the contributors to this volume argue that something is potentially overlooked with too close a focus on dialogism: many speakers, especially in charged political and religious contexts, work energetically at crafting monologues, single-voiced statements to which the only expected response is agreement or faithful replication. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the United States, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, Algeria, and Papua New Guinea, the authors argue that a focus on “the monologic imagination” gives us new insights into languages’ political design and religious force, and deepens our understandings of the necessary interplay between monological and dialogical tendencies.
Keywords:
monologue,
monologism,
dialogue,
dialogism,
Mikhail Bakhtin
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190652807 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190652807.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Matt Tomlinson, editor
Australian Research Council Future Fellow in Anthropology, The Australian National University in Canberra
Julian Millie, editor
Senior Lecturer and ARC Future Fellow in the Anthropology Program, Monash School of Social Sciences, Monash University
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