Dialogism

Dialogism is the central category of Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophy of language and theory of literature, according to which every utterance is by its nature dialogic: it is always addressed to someone, takes others' words into account, responds to prior utterances, and anticipates a reply. The word lives on the boundary of one's own and another's context; it is 'double-voiced.' Bakhtin opposed dialogism to monologism — the authoritarian word that admits no equal foreign voice. The conception was developed in 'Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics' (where the concept of the polyphonic novel is introduced) and 'Discourse in the Novel.' Dialogism is connected with the concepts of polyphony, heteroglossia, the foreign word, and answerability. Bakhtin's ideas influenced semiotics, the theory of intertextuality (Julia Kristeva), narratology, and cultural studies, becoming one of the cornerstones of 20th-century humanistic thought.