Heteroglossia
Heteroglossia a term associated with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the novel. Heteroglossia
means literally a variety of languages; for Bakhtin, heteroglossia is the variety of discourses, or
kinds of socially constructed speech, that are employed in any dialogic interaction. An example
of heteroglossia is the different kinds of language one employs in the course of the day: you
speak differently to your professor than you do to your friends or to your parents or to a police
offi cer. The kind of language you use is created by your social relationship to the person you are
talking to; to a professor or police offi cer, you are more likely to speak formally, politely, and
deferentially than you would to a friend or family member. Each social interaction determines
what kind of social speech (sociolect) you choose to use; each sociolect speaks from a worldview
shared by the two speakers involved in the dialogue. Heteroglossia is thus the sum of all the
sociolects employed by any speaker in any situation. Bakhtin argues that the form of the novel is
inherently heteroglossic; novels employ different voices through different characters, and use
different discourses to create a variety of worldviews. Novels told from a single perspective or
authorial stance tend to be monologic; novels narrated from multiple perspectives employ
heteroglossia to create multiple viewpoints and explanations. An example of a heteroglossic
novel is Melville’s Moby Dick, which uses a vast variety of discourses to explain the world.
Melville includes the language of Calvinist Christianity, which describes a world dominated by
sin and predestination; he also includes the language of capitalism, which describes a world more
concerned with profi t and loss than with salvation. Each language or discourse Melville uses—
from the natural history of whales to the mythology of the American frontier—creates a different
way of understanding the world that his words and characters create.
New Historicism
New Historicism is the name given to interdisciplinary historical cultural studies. New
Historicism fi rst appeared in Renaissance 9780826491909_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 57
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58 KEY TERMS IN LITERARY THEORY Studies, and was associated with Stephen
Greenblatt. New Historicism rejects the compartmentalization of disciplines fostered by the
university system, insisting that a particular cultural moment or phenomenon can best be
understood through examination of multiple factors, including economic, political, literary,
religious, and aesthetic beliefs and practices. Not a school, doctrine, or methodology, New
Historicism, also called “cultural poetics,” insists that all forms of discourse interact with all
other forms of discourse; it shares with Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser the insistence that
all institutional and individual practices are informed by discourse and ideology. A full analysis
of a cultural phenomenon thus requires what anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls “thick
description”: the close reading of the rhetoric of texts and practices from all aspects of a culture.
New Historicists also insist that the writer be self-refl exive, making it clear that interpretations
come from a specifi c scholar and perspective rather than presenting “truth.”
Intertextuality
Intertextuality means the interaction of texts. Coined by Julia Kristeva in reference to Mikhail
Bakhtin’s ideas of heteroglossia, intertextuality posits that a text (literary or non-literary) never
exists in isolation. Rather, all texts are made up of references to or quotations from other texts,
and are always in conversation with other texts. Intertextuality is not restricted to the idea of one
author being infl uenced or informed by another author, but rather encompasses the idea that
each text is engaged with preceding texts. T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, for example, continually
quotes from a huge range of literary works and languages, requiring the author’s explanatory
footnotes; through such intertextuality Eliot engages his readers in networks of ideas and
interpretations that are larger than his individual poem. Intertextuality is related to Genette’s
concept of hypertext.
Discourse
Discourse is a term associated primarily with Michel Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical
investigations into the creation of the human sciences. In his early works, he discusses discursive
formations as bodies of writing that constituted knowledge of a particular subject or idea;
discourse here is equivalent to archive, or to written records. In his later genealogical works,
Foucault examines both discursive and non-discursive practices and how both produce networks
of power/knowledge. The dictionary defi nes “discourse” as spoken or written expression; it
tends to imply a formal argument, like an essay, as in Descartes’ Discourse on Method. Foucault
uses discourse to refer to a body of writings that form what can be said or known about a
particular topic; the discourse on a topic limits and defi nes how a topic can be conceptualized
and acted upon. An example is soccer. Think of everything that has ever been written on soccer:
rules, history, biographies of players, news stories of games, sociological studies of soccer
crowds, medical studies of soccer injuries, laws about soccer as a public event, the impact of
television on the global popularity of soccer, the relation between soccer competition and
national identity—the list could go on forever. All of these writings put together constitute the
discourse on soccer; everything that can be said or known about soccer, in any aspect, is
contained within this discourse. The discourse on soccer exists not just as an archive, however,
but as the episteme within which soccer is enacted; how the game is played, understood, argued
about, loved, and hated are all created by the terms of the discourse on soccer.
