dialogizm

Dialogizm, also called dialogism, is a theory of language and literary form developed by the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. It holds that meaning arises in dialogic interactions among voices rather than from a single, authoritative speaker. Every utterance is shaped by previous talk and by anticipated responses, placing language in a social and historical context.

Core concepts include polyphony, the coexistence of distinct, equally valid consciousnesses within a single work; and heteroglossia, the presence of multiple social languages and ideologies within the same text. In a dialogic approach, authors do not simply convey their own interior truth; they stage a conversation among rival worldviews, genres, and voices that constantly contest and reinterpret one another.

Bakhtin applied dialogism to the novel, especially Dostoevsky, whose characters are not mouthpieces of a single authorial viewpoint but autonomous speakers with their own aims and moral horizons. The concept of the carnivalesque and the notion of the 'voices' of different social strata—street, church, state, and others—illustrate heteroglossia as a social and cultural phenomenon beyond individual texts. The dialogic method has influenced literary analysis, linguistics, cultural studies, and the study of media, emphasizing intertextuality, reception, and the social life of language.

Critics note that some readings overemphasize multiplicity or risk underestimating authorial intention; others debate how to judge competing voices within a text. Nevertheless, dialogizm remains a foundational framework for examining how texts embody competing meanings and how language continually answers to others in history.