What is Dialogism?

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a well-known Russian literary critic and semiotician. The notion of dialogism was mainly developed in his paper entitled “The Problem of Speech Genres” and written in the years 1952–1953, which was translated into French in 1984 and English in 1986. Here, Bakhtin explained that every utterance may be considered as a rejoinder in dialogue. Firstly, every utterance must be regarded as a response to preceding utterances in a given sphere of communication. Secondly, every utterance is oriented toward the response of the others. This notion of dialogism is linked to three major notions named by Bakhtin; responsive attitude of the listener, addressivity and speech genres.

For Bakhtin, when a listener understands the meaning of speech, he takes an active responsive attitude towards it: “he either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on. […] Any understanding of live speech, a live utterance, is inherently responsive, although the degree of this activity varies extremely” [4, p. 68]. Bakhtin notes that this also pertains to written and read speech. Thus, as he explains, the speaker himself is oriented toward an active responsive attitude: he expects some response, agreement, sympathy, objection, and so on. That means that the utterance (i.e., what is said) is related not only to preceding utterances, but also to subsequent links in a chain of statements. From the beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions of an audience.