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kingofmyborrowedheart · 3 years

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reputation: Creation of self, death of the author and heteroglossia So I wrote two papers last semester dealing with how Taylor created different images of herself for the reputation era using the theories of creation of self, death of the author and heteroglossia. Creation of self is the notion that you craft different versions of yourself for different situations (Bruner is the theorist), death of the author is the author removing themselves from the work (Barthes is the theorist) and heteroglossia is multiple voices in a single text (Bakhtin is the theorist). Taylor utilizes all of these to present reputation to both the general public/media and fans. There is the Bad/New Taylor Persona and the Old/Good Taylor present on each, along with True Taylor, they are all seen through both image and sound. Below the cut I will break down each theory and the relation to the era and album as a whole.

Creation of Self (Bruner)

The first image of the era that we see from Taylor is the social media blackout followed up by the videos of the snakes. This is Taylor ‘erasing’ her former image to the world and the first instance of her claiming and repurposing the title of ‘snake’. This creates the ground work for the new image of Taylor that is to come.

The next image put forth by Taylor is “LWYMMD” and its music video. The song is a departure from her previous sound and features more simplistic lyrics. In the video she creates multiple selves based off of the media’s perception of her (Tub Taylor, Queen of the snakes, etc.). She presents her new image with the Taylor Mountain where she pushes away her former images and selves to remain in control. The video opens with the last image tied to music that she put out (Zombie “OOTW” Taylor) burying 2014 Met Gala Taylor. This is symbolic of her ‘killing off’ the good girl public perception of herself through her music. This tied together with the line “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, cause she’s dead!” cements the idea that the previous image of herself that she presented to the general public is gone. The true/real Taylor is not completely dead however. She exists as the Palm Tree Taylor who stands above the media’s versions of her at the end and little details like the $1 in the tub. Lyrics like “The world moves on another day another drama, drama/But not for me, not for me/All I think about is karma/And then world moves on/But one thing’s for sure/Maybe I got mine but you’ll all get yours” are also representative of the real Taylor.

The next image is that from the “…Ready For It?” music video which features two versions of herself battling for control in the video. The hooded Taylor represents this new persona informed by the media and the skin like suit Taylor is the true Taylor. The two battle each other with the true Taylor winning out in the end, but taking with her bits and pieces of the other Taylor.

In the prologue for the album she declares “We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us.” which ties directly into Bruner’s thinking about creation of self. This indicates a bit of a separation from the previous version she had shown the public and this new one.

With the big promotional singles (“LWYMMD”, “…RFI?”, “End Game” and “Delicate”) they are all from the first half of the album which is where this new version of Taylor is primarily seen. With the exception of “Delicate”, which was the last single of the era, this would lead those who are not big fans to believe that the album is dominated by this darker sound and persona, when in actuality it is a mix of the true and media persona on the songs. The other songs released before the album (“Gorgeous”, “CIWYW”) were not promoted as much and reside on the second half of the album, where the real Taylor is. This was a nod to the fans that the sounds of Taylor that they had known previously were not completely gone.

Another idea of creation of self is one that is a matter of res publica or for the public. For the most part Taylor maintained that with each album/era, only slightly altering her image and sound, so when a major change came it wouldn’t be too drastic. This darker persona is one created from the mindset of cultural concern and is utilized to introduce the new album. This persona plays a bit into what the media expected for her come back: vindictive, bitter and angry.

Death of the author (Barthes)

Taylor attempts to remove her former image and her current image from the album by ‘killing off’ her older self and not speaking about the work after its release.

By ending the prologue with “There will be no further explanation. There will just be reputation” she is announcing that she is going to let the work speak for itself. This was also reinforced by her not doing any traditional press for the album.

Taylor ended the shows on tour with “and in the death of her reputation, she felt truly alive”. This leaves the audience with the idea of Taylor putting behind previous expectations held about her and it also removes herself from her previous image. This allowed for a potential new image to emerge for the next time she released new content.

Heteroglossia (Bakhtin)

The two voices that appear on this album are that of the “good” and “bad” girl, these correspond to the “old” and “new” Taylor. For the purpose of my paper I defined “good” as society’s standards for women: being pure, chaste, virginal, etc., as well as her own standards. The idea of “bad” is simply a woman who has autonomy and doesn’t fit in that strict box. The two blend together, resulting in Taylor living in between the two strict boundaries. What emerges from these two is the voice of True Taylor, which is a newer voice and has continued to be seen in her latest works.

The “good” girl voice is the one that had been dominant in her earlier work. This meant that she didn’t swear or discuss ‘adult’ subjects like sex or drinking. The “bad” girl voice is the one that first appears on reputation, she discusses these previously untouched topics unabashedly.

In my paper, I spilt the album into two parts: the “bad” girl voice and the “good” girl voice. Tracks 1-7 align closer to the “bad” girl voice, while 8-15 are representative of the “good” girl voice. However, these strict boundaries break down when looking at the lyrics of the songs in each section.

The “bad” girl voice leans a bit into what the media expected from her and is similar to the narrator of “Blank Space” in the way that it was crafted. Songs like “Don’t Blame Me” and lyrics like “I see nothing better/I keep him forever like a vendetta” play into the previous ‘boy crazy’ image. Sonically, these songs are a stark departure from her previous work. They are bombastic and she sounds braggadocious on the lyrics. This persona breaks down fairly quickly though. Embedded into the lyrics are glimpses of the ‘old Taylor’ and “Delicate” presents the first vulnerable moment on the album. The first hint that the album is not all that it may seem to be is with “End Game” where she confesses her wish to be the one her partner ends up with. This is a detour from the previous thinking that it would be her response to the ‘Great Cancellation’ and Kimye.

The “good” girl voice, much like the persona voice, also breaks down throughout the album. The songs on the latter half of the album include lyrics about drinking, which had not been something she had previously tackled and would be considered going against her earlier “good” girl image. The song closest to the “old Taylor” in both content and sound would be “CIWYW”, everything else is a departure in terms of subject matter. Much like most of the songs on the second half, “Dress” doesn’t fit in at all with the standards of a typical “good” girl and signals that she is presenting herself as an adult, regardless of what might be said about her image.

These two voices are not as strict as they appear at first glance and they blend together on every song to create her new voice. No one voice is dominant over the other, this results in the voice of True Taylor to emerge.

Final Thoughts

Taylor lets this new image and persona to introduce the music to the public and while it seems at first glance that this is the voice that is dominant on the album, she changes it up not far into it. Instead of fulfilling the media’s expectations on an album chock full of songs going scorched earth on her nemeses, she only throws them passing glances throughout and instead focuses on the newfound freedom and relationship that has come from falling out of the public’s good graces. Although she drops this persona fairly fast and returns to a place familiar to fans, some in the media managed to be tricked by the persona completely and did not see the “old” Taylor still living and breathing on the songs. The parts of herself that she leaves behind are those concepts that were boxing her in the image of a “good” girl and “America’s Sweetheart”. She comes away from this album no longer afraid of the backlash that might come from speaking out politically and on other matters important to her, like re-recording her catalog to regain ownership. She is able to present herself fully and not hide away aspects of her lifestyle, like sex and drinking, like she previously did to maintain that image. She lands in between the strict “good” and “bad” voices to create her true voice, which is in a grey area in the middle. This idea is represented on the album’s cover with her being portrayed in a grey color while the background is white and the text is black. Like all humans, she exists in a grey area between what is considered “good” and “bad” socially.

#taylor swift #reputation #payton: uses her brain #analysis #if you have questions or comments about this feel free to send me an ask about it!#the papers were both around 19/20 pages when I did my final revisions so there’s a lot of stuff that I left out here #I tried not to let this get bogged down by the sometimes confusing literary theories #the thing that makes this album great is that it’s human and messy especially when it’s compared to 1989 where she tried to make everything.#..about it perfect. a wise woman once said ‘nobody’s perfect’#like she wouldn’t have been able to release Nothing New or IBYTAM on Red because it clashed with her image drinking and swearing would’ve…#…been shocking although those are perfectly normal/acceptable activities for someone her age at the time #like the persona was a smart tactic because it played into what the media wanted but she had the upper hand all along #she’s angry on this album I mean who wouldn’t be after what happened but it’s in a way that the media didn’t anticipate #other aspects where she kept true to herself were the tour and secret sessions but she’s present on the album you just gotta search for her!#the true voice stems from not being confined to particular boxes and pops up on the album and works with both of the voices

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elisaenglish · 3 years

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The Mind Discourses

Let me be clear, this is a musing on language. As we segue from one moment to the next, filter through our lens and map our spheres, it is our constant. Coherence and connection, often more under the stewardship of a writer who understands. “[T]o keep civilisation from destroying itself,” Albert Camus writes, highlighting the duty of the writer, the responsibility – conveyed via lexis, signs. But none of this transpires in a vacuum. As Camus also writes:

“We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.”

It is to build a life, not raze one; to cultivate, not desecrate; to bloom a better time. Reminiscent of Sartre’s assertion that “words are loaded pistols,” Camus reflects that consequences are intrinsic thus, the what, the how, the when or where or why, as damaging in the wrong hands as the silent supplication of a hitherto healthy voice.

In theoretical terms, there are hints here of Mikhail Bakhtin and his view of language as broadly “dialogic,” comprised of “heteroglossia”. A single language, therefore, stratified from numerous others, always in dialogue with each other. As Bakhtin writes in Discourse in the Novel, we may break down:

“...any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behaviour, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups... languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions... each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases.”

Though crafted and, by nature of the form, artificial in prose fiction, the same essential principles apply across genres and, even, artistic mediums. Bakhtin refers to the “primordial dialogism of discourse” and the impossibility of linguistic or ideological “neutrality”. Art is a response, a retort, situated at a point of intersecting dialogue; conscious or not, the work is woven into a much larger conversation.

Any concrete discourse, Bakhtin writes:

“...finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist – or, on the contrary, by the “light” of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment... it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue... The way in which the word conceives its object is complicated by a dialogic interaction within the object between various aspects of its socio-verbal intelligibility.”

To suggest, instead, that the text possesses a monologic nature is to deny the complexity of our communicative desires and the overriding sense of connection between them. To naively engage in the dismissal of meaning – or worse, to believe in the absence of it – is to fail to appreciate language on a fundamental level. It is a loaded means of conveyance, one that lacks no degree of opacity should the writer wish to obscure a more transparent truth or, indeed, vice versa. Furthermore, words exist in relation to their contexts; effects become fluid as such, ebb and flow dependent on intertextual or socio-political dynamics, shift to accommodate or compete with other proximal meanings.

A word is never just a word, Bakhtin holds. It may charge an inferno, rage a nation. Just as it may inspire a greater love, true and determined and everything to us.

You don’t have to be a Russian formalist, post-structuralist, or anything of the intellectual sort to appreciate the import here – and yes, all the schools claim Bakhtin but it’s never really as simple as belonging only to one. As with language, we are often messy, transcendent. The ability to speak of what we know is a mighty thing, not least of all because so invariably we aren’t speaking for ourselves alone but, by dialogic means, for each other.

To each other. With each other.

And it matters. Hence why Sartre writes, “The aim of language... is to communicate... to impart to others the results one has obtained... As I talk, I reveal the situation... I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.” So it translates into the words we write, our humanity flowed to forever.

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skylerrroses-blog · 4 years

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Should Adaptation Adhere to the Source Material: An Analysis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its Fandom

This essay intends on exploring the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s relationship to media theory, in particular the ideas of fidelity in adaptation through the lens of Bakhtin’s Heteroglossic Approach (Bakhtin, 1934) and fandom reception and interpretation generated by the films via Jenkins’ ‘Textual Poachers’ theory (Jenkins, 1992) and other such sources to demonstrate how both fidelity and non-fidelity are valid ways in which to consume media, whilst also illustrating the shortcomings of both methods, and how embracing a balance of both is important for fandoms.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a series of films produced by the Disney-owned Marvel Studios, a branch of Marvel Comics dedicated to creating films and TV shows adapted from the popular and long-running connected Marvel comic book universe. These comics have been written and printed since 1939 with the release of their first issue, ‘Marvel Comics no. 1’ dating back to October 1939. Since then, the comic company has developed and held a large and passionate fanbase of readers up until the modern day. Many film and television adaptations of these comic books were created from this original source material, but it wasn’t until 2008, when Marvel Studios released ‘Iron Man’ (Favreau, 2008), that the idea of a Cinematic Universe was truly realised on the silver screen.

Since ‘Iron Man’, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown from one film to twenty-three, and with this growth came an increase in worldwide appeal and profit, becoming the single highest grossing film franchise in the world, according to statistics website ‘The Numbers’. However, the original Marvel Comics fans have still persisted amongst this massive growth of fanbase, and due to the diverging paths the narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (henceforth to be referred to as the MCU) from the Marvel Comics Universe (henceforth to be referred to as ‘Marvel 616’, the name of the universe in the comics), the fandom began to compare and speculate on the MCU through the lens of Marvel 616, expecting and anticipating certain storylines to be adapted to film. However, this created a dialogue within the fandom questioning whether it was important for the films to adhere to the source material, or whether it was just as valid, if not more creative to change elements of the story to better suit the differing tone of the universe. For example, in Cosmonaut Variety Hour’s video “The Marvel Cinematic Universe - All Marvel Movies reviewed and Ranked (pt. 2)” (2018), he criticises ‘Captain America: Civil War’ (Russo’s, 2016) by directly comparing it to the comic story ‘Civil War’ (in Figure 1).

In this clip, he admits that he often attempts to distance the story of the comics from the story of the MCU, but in cases where he perceives the original material to be superior, he cannot separate the adaptation from its original source material.

This brings up an interesting question: is fidelity necessary and important in adaptation, particularly of the comic book medium to film. Fidelity in adaptation is the idea that adaptations should adhere as closely as possible to the source material of that adaptation to satisfy fans and properly honour the original story. An example of this done to an extreme degree is ‘Watchmen’ (Snyder, 2010) which was praised by fans as being a ‘comic book come to life’. This approach is quite safe in terms of fan response; however, it creates a more intense expectation of quality and fidelity in the final product.

The MCU, however, tends to stray from the source material, instead employing the ‘Heteroglossic Method’, a method coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (Bakhtin, 1934). This method, employed by writers adapting material to other mediums, states that an adapted text that is reflected through the metaphorical lens of other creatives and creative visions will be different and reflect different themes and ideas of the story that may not have been explored in its original incarnation. The MCU heavily takes this route, as it veers away from the specific events and story beats of the Marvel 616 story, instead opting to tell their own story while adopting the familiar characters, locations, and broad plot structures of the source material.

This approach has become invariably successful, as while it portrays characters fans will recognise and latch onto, it creates its own story and world for the audience, fashioning its own identity outside that of its source material. In ‘Hunting the Dark Knight” (Brooker, 2012), Will Brooker analyses adaptation in the Batman universe by saying, “Nolan’s Batman movies were released into a complex network of existing, ongoing narratives, which continued during and after their cinematic exhibition. These narratives offered similar but distinct representations of the main character, his world, his history, and his supporting cast.” The idea of a separate distinct world that has similar and familiar elements to others running alongside can be reflected through the viewing of the MCU in relation to Marvel 616, as the latter of the two has continued through the 10+ year run of the MCU, with sales rising due to the films’ popularity. This distinct representation of these characters has resulted in a mixed opinion among fans of Marvel 616.

In Figure 2 by Twitter user @moonlillies, they criticise the MCU iteration of superhero Hawkeye by directly comparing him to his Marvel 616 counterpart and criticising the differences in his character. In contrast, below is a tweet from user @ParkerBMovies (Figure 3), who expresses their preference for the MCU iterations of the characters, claiming they “are the best incarnations of the characters, even better than the comics.”

This large variation in opinion between individuals within the fandom is only natural due to the sheer size of fandom groups on the internet on sites and forums such as Twitter or reddit, but the existence of a discourse around this topic paints the idea of fidelity in an interesting light, as it portrays fidelity and heteroglossia as both inherently neutral and up to interpretation of the individual and is therefore subjective to the individual.

However, another element of the fandom is anti-fans. Anti-fans, which are the topic of Jonathon Gray’s article “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans” (Gray, 2003), are a group of non-fans who consume certain media in order to criticise it and express their vitriol towards it. A Twitter user with the display name ‘milo’ in Figure 4 below criticises a sect of Marvel 616 stans (a term for super-fans) who deem themselves better than MCU stans “because they read the comics”, while also stating “not everyone has access to comics. Not anyone has the money to buy them”.

The concept that this Twitter user is criticising overlaps with the academic journal “

Modelling the Marvel Everyfan: Agent Coulson and/as Transmedia Fan Culture” (Scott, 2017), in which the author, Suzanne Scott, analyses the transmedia franchising model that the MCU developed, and how this franchising model is to the benefit of the ‘everyfan’, a concept that implies that the majority of fans are an “avid consumer, collector and completionist”. This concept fundamentally benefits middle-class male-driven methods of fan engagement and ignores other methods that are more commonly employed by women or minority groups. This imbalance in the fandom can create animosity between its members

due to a perceived superiority of Marvel 616 by some sects of fans due to the MCU being an adaptation. This shows an inherent bias for some who prefer the original material as they can often be influenced by nostalgia and may not be able to see the strengths of adapted material. Due to the subjective nature of the topic, the preference to older material is acceptable, however many view the putting down of other fans due to their own preferences as veering into the ideology of anti-fans, and so heavily discouraged within the fandom. Another concept within fandom that is important when talking about the MCU is the idea of ‘Textual Poachers’, a term coined by Henry Jenkins in “Textual Poachers: Television fans and participatory culture” (Jenkins, 1992) that describes a certain group of fans who take the existing material of the text, and in this case the films, and builds off of it with their own creative ideas and stories; this can include art, fanfiction and fan films. This fan-created content in an important factor to consider whilst analysing adaptation through the lens of fandom, as fanfiction and fan content is its own form of informal adaptation that is consumed by the fandom itself. Due to its widespread appeal within the fandom thanks to its quicker production, higher quantity, and relatively easy distribution along with its often free cost, fanfiction and fan content is viewed and consumed much more readily by the fandom, and therefore expectations of quality and potential content are formed in the eyes of the fan.

These pieces of fan content can often be inspired by events from Marvel 616, as there is far more potential content to draw from, even when in the context of the MCU, which creates a set of desires for where fans want to see the actual story go. Since expectations are set, they can often not be met by the films in the MCU being underwhelming or simply not playing out how people may have hoped. Therefore the MCU is further compared to Marvel 616 as an inferior adaptation of the original source material. However, this building of expectations can also be very enriching and exciting to many fans, as being validated by the films can be a very positive experience.

This is often the case with pairings known as ‘ships’, where people speculate for romantic relationships between two characters and voice their support in favour of them becoming a couple in the narrative. Often, however, these ships are not validated, and some fans tend to become passionate when their pairings do not come true. For example, in Figure 5 below the user @CROWLEYBEANS criticises the MCU on how their favoured pairing, “Stucky” (a romantic relationship between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes), was not canonical because of its nature as a non-heterosexual couple. In fandom, seeking representation through media is exceedingly common, as observed again in “Textual Poachers: Television fans and participatory culture” (Jenkins, 1992), where Jenkins studies the fanfiction created by fans of ‘Star Trek: The Original Series’ (Roddenberry, 1966-1967) that pair Captain Kirk with his crewmate Spock. In this, he speaks on how fandoms can often create their own representation through the interpretation of media to feel as though they have a voice and an identity that can be seen in the media that they watch and look up to. These fans would argue that adhering to potential source material is not always the best story option, as it deprives the text of representation that could have a positive impact on fans and straying from the original material for adaptation can be advantageous for the overall quality.

The fandom that has developed around the MCU encompasses many types of fans due to its sheer size, such as Marvel 616 fans, avid consumers of all content, MCU-exclusive fans, fans on a casual level, and so forth. This means the fandom itself cannot truly come to a unified consensus about fidelity in adaptation from Marvel 616 to the MCU, however a concrete measure of success for the MCU can be seen in the general size of the fandom, along with its popularity in modern pop culture. The unequivocal success of the MCU lends to the idea that regardless of fidelity in adaptation, so long as the adaptation in question is enjoyable and presents interesting characters and a compelling narrative, a fandom will generate around it to support and consume it. As a consumer of the MCU member of its fandom, I am sympathetic to those who seek representation through media as I often find representation from similar social groups to mine in mainstream media to be important for many fans, including myself. In terms of adaptation, I am not insistent on fidelity, as I believe that many of the stories told in the MCU are better than many of the stories within Marvel 616 due to being far more character driven over spectacle. As a consumer, I am happy with the direction the MCU is taking in terms of narrative, however I would appreciate more representation as it is an important aspect of the films for the fandom surrounding it. In conclusion, fidelity in media is a valid way of consuming media due to a connection to the source material, however it is also important to embrace the heteroglossic approach when consuming media such as the MCU, as creatives seek to tell their own stories through adaptation and fans may desire other forms of representation through stories that were not originally present.

Word Count: 2,208

References:

Bakhtin, M., 1934. Discourse in the Novel. Austin and London: University of Texas Press

Jenkins, H., 1992. Textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture. New York: Routledge.

Brooker, W. 2012. Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman. New York: I.B. Tauris

The Numbers, 2020. Movie Franchises [online]. California: Nash Information Services LLC. Available from: https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchises [Accessed 1 June 2020]

Cosmonaut Variety Hour, 2018. The Marvel Cinematic Universe – All Movies Reviewed and Ranked (Pt. 2)[video, online]. Youtube. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUl7y9qNZqQ&t=1843s [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Cox, G. & Steinberg, B., 2017. Comic Book Sales Fly on the Capes of Hit Movies, TV Shows [online]. California: Variety. Available from: https://variety.com/2017/film/news/comic-book-sales-superhero-movies-1202499029/ [Accessed 1 June 2020]

Rosy Maple Moth Stan Account, 2019. Clint having a family in the mcu. Twitter moonlillies [online]. 8 February 2019. Available from: https://twitter.com/moonliIIies/status/1093881781147836418?s=20 [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Parker B, 2018. Hot Take. Twitter ParkerBMovies [online]. 8 December 2018. Available from: https://twitter.com/ParkerBMovies/status/1071226507123703808?s=20 [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Gray, J., 2003. New audiences, new textualities: Anti-Fans and non-fans. International journal of Cultural studies [online]. 6(1), 64-81.

Milo, 2019. comic stans that think theyre better than mcu stans. Twitter fuckclub [online]. 17 December 2019. Available from: https://twitter.com/fuckcIub/status/1207086328778756096?s=20 [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Scott, S., 2017. Modelling the Marvel Everyfan: Agent Coulson and/as Transmedia Fan Culture. Palabra Clave [online]. 20(4): 1042-1072

blacklivesmatter, 2018. If Steve or Bucky was a woman. Twitter CROWLEYBEANS [online]. 9 May 2018. Available from: https://twitter.com/CROWLEYBEANS/status/994314360171397122?s=20

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riotsofspring27 · 5 years

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Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin used the word “polypholy”, literally meaning many voiced, to describe literary writing that managed to liberate the voice of its characters from under the domination of the authorial or narratorial voice. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1984), Bakhtin refers to polyphony as a new kind of artistic thinking because what he has in mind goes against the grain of the traditional privileging of harmony, which means many voices heard as one. The reader of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin suggests, cannot but have the impression that he or she isn't dealing with a single author, but is in fact faced with a multiplicity of authors (Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor, and so on), each of whom has their own unique voice. See also carnivalesque; chronotope; dialogism; heteroglossia.

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heteroglossia · 6 years

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[The word] therefore presumes nothing beyond the borders of its own context (except, of course, what can be found in the treasure-house of language itself). The word forgets that its object has its own history of contradictory acts of verbal recognition, as well as that heteroglossia that is always present in such acts of recognition.

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

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narrativetherapy-blog · 6 years

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I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness. The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate; to be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another. I cannot manage without another. I cannot become myself without another. I must find myself in another by finding another in myself (in mutual reflection and mutual acceptance).

— Mikhail Bakhtin, Theory of Socialization (via heteroglossia)

#mikhail bakhtin #relational identity #relationship #interdependence #being #mutuality #boundaries

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areyouthereyaitsmecriticaltheory · 4 years

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What is a Novel? Heteroglossia and David Yoon’s Frankly in Love

In reading, we often focus so much on determining what we are reading about and forget to think about how we are reading about it. In thinking about how to define and classify the genre of young adult fiction, I began to think about its parent genre–the novel. The novel is most likely the predominant mode of young adult fiction because of when the genre emerged; according to Michael Cart, in 1942 (Cart 11). Evidently, the popularity of epic and poetry had long been replaced by the novel when young adult fiction’s genesis occurred. The novel has remained the predominant mode of young adult fiction to this day; from the “golden age” of the genre–S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, Walter Dean Myers’ Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff, Judy Blume’s Forever, Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Sylvia Engdahl’s Enchantress from the Stars, and Richard Sleator’s House of Stars, to recent YA phenomena like the Twilight series, The Hunger Games, the works of John Green, Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, and the novel I will analyze today, David Yoon’s Frankly in Love. Although the styles of each work are evidently distinct, from first person to third person, realism to dystopian, and about widely different aspects of adolescence, each work is undeniably a novel. So, in order to determine what the novel serves to represent adolescent experience, one first has to ask what is a novel? Keep reading to find out.

Synopsis of Critical Theory

Although I doubt Mikhail Bakhtin would have intended his notion of heteroglossia (literally different tongues/languages) to be related to young adult fiction, I do not think his argument is inconsistent with the genre. In “Discourse in the Novel” Mikhail Bakhtin defines the novel as “as a diversity of social speech types, sometimes even diversity of languages and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (Bakhtin 32). Then, Bakhtin insists that “Literary language” “is itself stratified and heteroglot in its aspect as an expressive system, that is, in the forms that carry its meanings” (Bakhtin 33). Such stratification, Bakhtin outlines, is “generic,” “professional,” “social,” “historical,” and “socio-ideological” (Bakhtin 33-34).

Thus, the language of the novel reflects the various stratifications of language in real life:

all languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values. As such they may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically. As such they encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people – first and foremost, in the creative consciousness of people who write novels. (Bakhtin 34)

Bakhtin also argues that language is at the same time individual and related to that beyond oneself: “As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies in the borderline between oneself and the other” (Bakhtin 35).

Ultimately, through his definition of the novel as heteroglot, Bakhtin concludes that interpretation is infinite: “The semantic structure of internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean” (Bakhtin 44). Due to the fact that the reader’s relationship to language is heteroglot and stratified in ever new individual ways, people will inherently read the novel in different ways at different times. In thinking about how this relates to the genre of young adult fiction and my own experience of reading works from the “golden age” of YA, I determine (and I think Bakhtin would agree) that it is still valuable to read such works in 2020. Although I may not read Blume’s Forever as someone would have in its year of publication, that does not make my interpretation any less valuable, In fact, Bakhtin’s idea democratizes interpretation, in that no interpretation can be privileged over another, because they are all as individualistic regardless of who the reader is and when they read the work.

Application

Although I could argue for the heteroglossic nature of each work of “golden age” YA I outlined above, I think recent trends in the genre, as exemplified in David Yoon’s 2019 Frankly in Love, allow for a clear connection between the novel and heteroglossia. As YA fiction has become increasingly more diverse so too has its language. For instance, in Frankly in Love Yoon stratifies language between that of English (Californian), Korean, Spanish, text, email, student, son, friend, and boyfriend (Yoon 39, 43, 62, 65, 67, 70, 109, 131, 133, 259, 293-294, 376, 379, 401). This list is not extensive, and I encourage you to see what other types of languages (‘generic,’ ‘professional,’ ‘social,’ ‘historical,’ and ‘socio-ideological’) your students can identify in reading the text.

The novel is self-aware of the various languages it uses to represent the narrative. In fact, the narrator, Frank, explicitly calls out such a practice: “In Language class Ms. Chit would call this code switching. It’s like switching accents, but at a more micro level. The idea is that you don’t speak the same way with your friends (California English Casual) that you do with a teacher (California English Formal), or a girl (California English Sing-song), or your immigrant parents (California English Exacerbated). You may change how you talk to best adapt to whoever you’re talking to” (Yoon 39). Although Frank refers to “code switching” here rather than the stratification of language that is heteroglossia, the variety of languages present in the novel is still the central idea. Thus, the definition of code switching that Frank provides only further highlights the multiple languages he uses, and that consequently Yoon uses in the novel.

Frankly in Love not only exemplifies heteroglossia, but also reflects and encourages Bakhtin’s notion that there are ‘ever newer ways to mean.’ This perhaps is best reflected in the title of the novel, which serves as a pun for the main character’s name: Frank Li. Thus, the title can be interpreted both figuratively and literally. The novel is literally about the protagonist, Frank Li, in love, and is figuratively an honest and “frank” account of being in love. Therefore, the title alone encourages readers to interpret words in multifaceted ways and nods to the multiple meanings of language depending upon the reader and context.

To return to my initial question, then, the novel serves to represent the various languages of adolescents. Consequently, adolescents, as readers, provide a unique perspective and relationship to language that perpetuates words’ quality to possess ‘ever newer ways to mean.’ Ultimately, Young Adult fiction, as a genre comprised of novels, intersects with a variety of languages, but predominantly is defined and interpreted by the language of adolescents.

Discussion Questions

How does Frankly in Love reflect Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia?

How does Yoon stratify language in the novel? What languages does the novel rely upon to tell Frank’s story?

How does Frankly in Love promote the idea that language is both individual and representative of the “other”?

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” Literary Theory an Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell Publishers, 1998, p. 32-44.

Cart, Michael. “From Sue Barton to the Sixties.” Young Adult Literature from Romance to Realism, Chicago, Neal-Schuman, 2016.

Yoon, David. Frankly in Love. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2019.

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ngilesewurhet-blog · 6 years

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Social Drama, Drama, Drama

The Bakhtin Reader: Social Heteroglossia, and Dramatism

Never has a word been so out of my realm of understanding. What is heteroglossia? I found myself reading and re-reading so many times that it took me several hours to get through half of the reading, at which point I threw up my hands and decided to let the class discussion help me to bridge the gap because I�� wasn’t👏 getting👏 it 👏 What I liked about learning of Bakhtin is that he was outcasted by his own community, even is own mentor wouldn’t speak to him, because of his diverted theories. It is my opinion that the character of a person has the potential to be drastically wisened if one has gone through some kind of tumultuous experience in life. So Bakhtin has earned my respect, at least through this narrowly-casted lens. As Bakhtin believes, “At both individual and social levels, productive vitality and creativity derive from a continuous dialogic struggle within and between discourses” (par 2). Hence, the conversation with myself that allowed me to make the former claim and his own, strained course of institutional shaming. Like I said, before class discussion, I was lost as to what I should have been gaining from this, and knew that I would better understand once we, as a community, had a dialogue about it. First came discourse, then came epiphany. The reason I was having such a difficult time making meaningful comprehension of the text is because I didn’t understand the context. And therein lies the meaning of heteroglossia—I think. In the text’s words, “Bakhtin stresses that the force of centralization is indispensable to the life of language in guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding; without that core stability verbal discourse as a system of signs could not exist” (74). The way I interrupt this to the laymen, i.e., myself, is that language or utterances can only really have meaning based on the mutual understanding of said utterance, which I kind of equate to hearing a foreign language but not understanding it. The language itself has gobs of meaning, but to me, Finnish is literal gibberish. Another example would be when my student the other day said, “you just have to send full stop”. I know what those words mean separately, but together I had zero clue. From context, I think he meant, “go for it”, but I can’t be sure. Utterance itself is not meaning and language is bigger than the symbols. I believe the concept of heteroglossia shares some “common ground” with Burke’s concept of common ground between speaker and audience. Burke believed that we think and perceive the world through language and that examining a person’s language gives you insight into who they are (Crane). This theory is dramatism—the world’s a stage—and you can determine a person’s motives by looking rhetorically at the language they choose. How Burke goes about this gets a bit confusing with the pentadic analysis, which involves examining rhetorical choices within the act, and not the act itself. If I sound confused, that’s because I am. However, once you spend some time practicing the technique, it begins to sink in. Burke is concerned with motive— as am I— compared to Aristotle, who was concerned with effect. And so to examine motive he offers the pentad: Act, Agent, Agency, Scene, and Purpose. Figure these out and you can determine motive… but it’s never that simple. Or maybe it is and I just have a combative sense of the world that makes me question the “authoritative word”.

#bakhtin #dramatism #kenneth burke #rhetoric

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ab5420695 · 7 years

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A Proposal to Write Urban Drab: An Epic of the Everyday

(The following is a proposal I submitted for my FA-CW 112.1 class, and is the latest copy that I can find. The copy I actually passed has been deleted from my cloud by mistake, and so this copy is the most recent version after that one.)

I plan to write an epic that problematizes and attempts to capture the Filipino everyday for my thesis project. This epic will be a book-length poem about the experiences of a central character who struggles with the hardest quest of all: the struggle to continue living in an increasingly complex world. I call this manuscript Urban Drab due to my desire to subtly invoke the idea of conflict in plain sight, as the United States Military utilized the olive drab color as the main color for their camouflage patterns during the Second World War.

So far, it contains my poems Phaeton, which juxtaposes a student’s tricycle ride home and a fantasy of legendary heroes in the modern world, and Drought, which reimagines the story of Susanna from the book of Daniel in an apartment complex in Manila. These two poems were originally written for my Introduction to Poetry class back in my second year, and the poems depict the reemergence of the fantastic in two different situations. A student’s tricycle commute immediately invokes the kind of journey that an epic usually contains, and it opens the student’s mind to notice things in the surroundings that are usually not seen because of a jeep’s much faster speed. Meanwhile, a scene of a neighbor peeping at another portrays the unearthing of a repressed fantasy. Both of these works use the contemporary urban setting of Metro Manila as a space where the mythic and the fantastic can flourish, and these two poems can serve as key scenes in this tapestry. Phaeton represents the freedom that I find in my own experience as a commuter who travels between Las Pinas and Quezon City during the weekends.

After all, my preoccupation as a writer has always been that of the effects of history and how it affects the people of the present. I have been attracted to the idea of writing my own epic since high school, and so I see it fitting that I end my studies as a CW major by memorializing the everyday into an epic of my own. Texts like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Mikhail Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel, and Homi Bhabha’s Of Mimicry and Man all influenced me in different ways.

The Waste Land portrays the chaos and desolation of 20th-century Europe using an incoherent and fragmented style, and the incorporation of fragments from different cultural texts is a much more deliberate and purposeful usage of allusion than what I exhibited during my first two years in the University. Examples such as the very first line “April is the cruelest month” subverts a similar line in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, while The Fire Sermon lifts a line out of Paul Verlaine’s Parsifal, referencing both Sir Percival’s abstinence and the titular Buddhist sermon about detachment from the five senses. These are only two examples of how Eliot incorporates references and allusions to reinforce the theme of hopelessness and the search for meaning in a desolate world.

In Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin dismisses poetry and epic poetry due to its monologic qualities that present the primacy of the speaker’s perspective above all. He praises the heteroglossia that is present in the novel since it allows varying voices and viewpoints to work in tandem with the novel’s elements to enrich its discourse. Bakhtin presupposes that poetry cannot exhibit anything else than a complete unity of language, and I feel that poems like The Waste Land prove him wrong. Lastly, Bhabha’s Of Mimicry and Man made me aware of the cultural politics that take place in formerly colonized countries, and his concept of mimicry informed my practice of allusion into an attempt to subvert and even shake off colonial influence.

Two principal problems spring up in the creation of my manuscript, and I would say that both are inherent in the notion of my project. One is the complex notion of the everyday, and the other is the effectiveness of the epic as a form that can depict the quotidian.

Rita Felski talks about the several aspects of the everyday in her introduction to The New Literary History. Felski cites Raoul Vaneigem’s idea of the everyday as a mass of "seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in search of a foothold in reality, feelings at once confused and luminously clear, ideas and gestures presaging nameless upheavals.” She rejects the notion of defamiliarization and instead turns her attention to the kind of creativity and ingenuity found in the notion of “everyday tactics”. Michel de Certeau praises the shortcuts that people use to complete their tasks, and sees them as small-scale subversions of authority.

Furthermore, in Everyday Aesthetics, she derides the comparison of the everyday to conservativism or quietism, but she examines the everyday’s potential to provide a “more expansive and ecumenical account” of aesthetic experience. For her, “seeing something as taken-for-granted” is inevitable and not the “cardinal sin” in many schools of contemporary thought. Felski uses phenomenology to help her illustrate her argument, as it is a descriptive discipline that captures “ordinary objects and mundane forms of feeling and thought” purely to understand what they are.

Because of Felski’s advocacy to examine the mundaneness of the everyday and not the jouissance that other intellectuals advocate in their efforts to break the rhythm of the quotidian, the epic, as a form that traditionally espouses a grand narrative, becomes a strange form to concretize the everyday on. Erik Martiny borrows Ezra Pound’s definition of the epic: “a poem containing history” to demonstrate the vague state of the form during the 20th century.

As a temporary answer of sorts, I will attempt to memorialize and romanticize the everyday struggles of ordinary Filipinos by trying to describe their daily lives in the best way that I can. For me, the attempt at description will suffice as the grand narrative that my epic will tell.

140412

Andre Barbarona

Works Cited

Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London, 2000), p. 122

Felski, Rita. "Introduction." New Literary History 33.4 (2002): 607-22. JSTOR. Web. 7 Apr. 2017.

Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." The Location of Culture. N.p.: Routledge, 1994. 85-92. Print.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. "The Waste Land." The Annotated Waste Land With Eliot's Contemporary Prose. Ed. Lawrence S. Rainey. N.p.: n.p., 2006. N. pag. Print.

Runchman, Alex. " Containing History: Epic Poetry and Revisions of the Genre." A Companion to Poetic Genre. Ed. Erik Martiny. N.p.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 521-31. Print.

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