Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Discourse in the Novel

Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights

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Projective Citizenship--The Reimagining of the Citizen in Post-War American Poetry

The personhood movement in dementia research has established the theoretical foundation for implementing cultural arts interventions in care practices. The underlying assumption is that professionals from the visual and the performance arts are well equipped to see the person behind the condition and to focus on possibilities for meaningful relationships in the here and now. This article focuses on poetry interventions as one example of cultural arts interventions. The use of poetry might seem counterintuitive, given that people with dementia lose their language abilities and that poetry is regarded to be the most complex literary form. I will argue that expanding on existing research on poetry interventions from a health and science perspective with a humanities approach will help illuminate how poetry works to enhance the exchange with people with dementia. Drawing on participant observations of poetry interventions by Gary Glazner (Alzheimer's Poetry Project, USA) at the New York Memory Center, I will frame poetry interventions as a specific form of oral poetry in which people with dementia are positioned as cocreators of embodied texts and directly benefit from the power of the spoken word.

Healing words: A study of poetry interventions in dementia care.

In 1934-35, in his long essay "Discourse in the Novel," Russian theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin declared that the natural and healthy state of language, which is a changing, socially stratified, multivocal clatter of discourses, is unrepresentable in poetry. Poetry, he said firmly, must be univocal or monologic: "Contradictions, conflicts and doubts remain in the object, in thoughts, in living experiences-in short, in the subject matter-but they do not enter into language itself. In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted" (1981a, 286). This differentiates poetry from other genres, which may represent the dialogic nature of human interaction. Bakhtin says of the dialogic utterance, "Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation of any living dialogue" (280), a situation particularly representable for Bakhtin in the novel but impossible within the confines of poetry's singular voice.On its face Bakhtin's limiting claim about poetry seems to fall somewhere between naive and outrageous and yet, as several Bakhtinian literary critics have noted, it has in practice become a working truism. The novel, the genre Bakhtin heralded as most dialogic, has in fact been the most common genre to draw Bakhtinian analysis. As both a poetry critic and a great admirer of Bakhtin, however, I am among a smattering of writers who maintain that this tacit marginalization of an entire genre is a premature foreclosure on both poetry and Bakhtin's own literary philosophy. This essay has two purposes: to insist again that dialogic poetry is possible, which I will do by tracing the dialogism of the word and character-based dialogism in a heteroglossic lyric by Robert Hayden, foregrounding especially ways in which the lyric not only allows but even through its form makes possible a Bakhtinian clash of voices and ideas; and to connect this reading to the strengthening field of literature and ethics by arguing that a second dialogue, that between the poem and the answerable reader who attends the text, is implored, demanded, and even enacted by the lyric's mobilization of voices and forms, including its use of call-and-response traditions. Studying one model of a dialogic poem and concentrating especially on its formal elements and what I contend is its self-conscious evocation of the reader's answerability, I establish the participation of the lyric in the ethical encounters of dialogue.On its surface, then, this reading appears to simply contradict Bakhtin's literary theory, in which he understood literature as a site for the representation of actual speech and human exchange. For Bakhtin, the novel is the genre that accomplishes the subversive, ethically necessary act of decentralization, in large part through its incorporation of multiple voices representing clashing ideologies or world views, what Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia" and Michael Holquist has helpfully described as a "plurality of relations" rather than just a "cacophony of different voices" (1990, 89). Dialogism and heteroglossia resist monologism, in which "all fully signifying authorial interpretations are sooner or later gathered together in a single speech center and a single consciousness; all accents are gathered together in a single voice" (Bakhtin 1984, 204). Through the last several centuries, Bakhtin argues, the novel's dialogic, heteroglossic form was countered by the high form of poetry, which "was accomplishing the task of cultural, national, and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world in the higher official socio-ideological levels" (198 Ia, 273). Indeed, as even casual students of Bakhtin soon know, poetry is in his oeuvre not merely negligible but an active enemy, a genre closely aligned with authoritative, monologic, oppressive powers that would squelch all productive, life-giving, ethical dialogic encounters: "Poetic style," he writes, "is by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse," causing poetry to become dogmatic and conservative (285), its very rhythms responsible for strangling the internal dialogism of the living word (298). …

Mara Scanlon

Papers

Ethics and the Lyric: Form, Dialogue, Answerability