Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian theorist is one of the most prominent and original philosophers of the twentieth century. He is known as a literary critic and a linguist but he himself asserted, “I am a Philosopher”. He is also considered as a ‘Philosopher of Human Communication’. The quest for self and selfhood led him to a research which lasted for many years and his theories of dialogism, heteroglossia and polyphony, monologism, outsideness, chronotope, carnivalesque, utterance and word etc. are the result of this quest.
Bakhtin endeavoured to attempt the question, very basic as well as the ultimate question, Who Am I? He went out of his way to search the various notions of Selfhood. He was a keen student of questions about individual subjectivity.…show more content… He contrasts the dialogic and monologic work of literature. The ‘dialogic’ work carries a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors. Term ‘dialogic’ does not only apply to literature. For Bakhtin, it applies to all languages, for him all thoughts are dialogic in nature. No word is spoken or written in vacuum. Every thought is either a response to the things said before or an anticipation of the things to be said in future. He says, “Every word gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular man, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and context in which it has lived its intense social life” (in Todorov,…show more content… The word Dialogue is derived from Latin word dialogos. Dia means through or inter and logos means speech, oration or a discourse. It is communication with multiple works. In the literary sense, dialogue means the way we interpret; de/re-construct the text in relation to its context. Dialogism is the organizing principal of both polyphony and heteroglossia. The term ‘dialogism’ denotes the quality of an instance of discourse that explicitly acknowledges that it is defined by its relationship to other instances, both past, to which it responds, and future, whose response it