•  
  •  
 

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

double-voice, The Tempest, Shakespearean drama, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin

College

Humanities

Department

Comparative Arts and Letters

Abstract

Mikhail Mikhailovich (M. M.) Bakhtin is increasingly becoming one of the important literary theorists of our century. Writing in Stalinist Russia in the first half of this century, Bakhtin has come out of obscurity in the last twenty or so years to a place of prominence. His literary theories are broad and diverse. One dimension to his theories stood out to me as being particularly useful to any reading of Shakespeare. Bakhtin, while writing about the novel, articulated the nature of “double-voiced discourse”&that is, discourse which anticipates, incorporates, and is penetrated by the discourse of others, words “with a sideward glance” to those surrounding the speaker (1). Granted, Bakhtin specifically states that such “dialogized” discourse is a “privilege available neither to dramatic nor to poetic genres” (2). However, as Helene Keyssar notes, several of Bakhtin’s “key concepts,” including double-voiced discourse, seem “not just applicable to drama but centered in the most elemental attributes of dramatic forms”(3). Keyssar goes on to defend Bakhtin’s position in regards to classical drama and to justify her use of his theories for modern drama.

Download

Share

COinS