Polyphony of Toni Morrison's God Help the Child

Journal of Children's Literature Studies, 2017

This paper aims to study and analyze Hamid Reza Shahabadi’s distinguished young adults’ novel, Lullaby for the Dead Girl, based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical literary framework so as to decide whether the text is dialogical and multi voiced. I have used a reflective content analysis method with a descriptive-interpretive approach to identify the elements that make the novel dialogic and multivoiced. Bakhtin introduces novel as a genre that is multivoiced, against tantalization and affirms otherness. He argues that as the diverse and distinct voices in the discourse of the novel carry different values and predispositions, they cannot be fully reconciled and merged into a totality. This gives the novel its unique quality to refrain from a totalized resolution. In the Shahabadi’s novel one can identify elements such as a circle of multiple narrators, multiple shifts of time-place, female narrators, unfinalized resolution, specific location of the events, and concentration on the problems of young girls that make the text multivoced and dialogical. Besides, the nonlinear and decentered narration of the novel accompanied by multiple shifts in the narrators of the events leads to the enhancements and improvement of young readers’ literary capabilities. The novel somehow helps the reader to recognize its decentralized narration.

The journey to finding the right voice for a novel can be an arduous one. My novel Cokcraco (Lacuna Publishing, 2013) took fifteen years and many layers to complete. The only way to resolve the issue of voice in this book was to create a multi-layered narrative in which contradictory voices emerged to create a polyphonic whole. The polyphonic or dialogic novel is nothing new. Mikhail Bakhtin borrowed the phrase from a musical concept referring to the diversity of voices in Dostoyevsky's novels. Recently, there has been a resurgence of novels of this type that play with simultaneity, contradiction, and the empty space between voices, echoing our post-modern, multi-tasking reading practice. Cokcraco is an inadvertent polyphonic novel whose layers of discourse evolved during the fifteen year writing process and the author's struggle to find its " voice ". This paper will examine the complex process of writing the polyphonic novel and highlighting its potential value in today's multiplicitous climate. It's called multi-tasking. Students sit in a lecture theatre, plugged into their iPhones. They are also listening to the lecture, looking at the power point slides, slouching in front of a laptop which feeds them Facebook news. And they are also texting. They can flip over to playing a game too when bored. The lecturer at the front of the hall rails against what he calls such antisocial behaviour, admonishing them to close their laptops, pull the plugs out of their ears, turn off their mobiles and concentrate on the monotask at hand. Surprised, hurt even, they say they are listening. They're googling a reference; they're writing a sentence of a new story that pops into their head because of something he said—they're checking out the new Creative Writing website to look at the assessment criteria he has just mentioned. And they're texting their friends a running commentary of the lecture. It is more than simply multi-tasking: it is a way of experiencing and interacting with the world. It is a stand too against the authority of a monologous voice. First appeared in Writing in Practice Vol I 2016 http://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/current-wip-edition-2/articles/writing-the-polyphonic-novel.html

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND TRANSLATION STUDIES (IJELR), 2023

The majority of works of literature depict the world of what many people call normal characters, in this case the characters without disabilities, especially the deaf. Mark Medoff's play, Children of Lesser God, depicts a world of a deaf character who has been neglected by his surrounding many for the reason that she (Sarah) cannot understand the world of normal people. However, this study analyzes the structure of discourses made by Sarah to show the fact that unlike the majority of characters in the play, the silent world of Sara is full of diverse deep psychological insight, none of which are identifiable for the other characters. In this article, it will be shown that what deaf people can understand from their surroundings is more than the grasp of common people's words and actions. They, in fact, are capable of understanding what goes under the very seemingly unimportant words or deeds of common people. Consequently, this article leads to the realization that the silence of this minor group of disabled people is full of polyphonies and, therefore, this article uses some of Bakhtin's polyphonic discourse types to shed light on the abundance of such facts. The final stage of this study depicts the world of deaf people as a world belonging neither to common humans, nor what common humans think of these deaf individuals; they, in fact, experience a third-world in which any signification is necessarily deep in terms of its thematic structure.

2009

Ringvorlesung "Sound & Literatur", 2019

Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL), 2021

In this article the polyphonic structures of two novels from two distinct literary traditions are put under parallel syntactic analysis. Both texts are prevalently dominated by both inner and outer dialogisms, but the psychological tempers of their authors have dramatically affected the styles of their narration. In The Sound and the Fury, the inner polyphonies are of a high importance. Quentin- reckoned to be symbol of Faulkner in this article- narrates most of his part through flashbacks and dialogues that occur in his mind. In fact, these inner polyphonies endorse the fact that Faulkner had the same obsessions of Quentin. These repressed complexities have direct relations with Faulkner`s disappointments of his family and life and these internal struggles were still present in 1929 when the book published. Faulkner`s psychological complexities led him to hint them through symbolization of a character who always talks to himself and remember all others’ dialogues in his mind. Soliloquies and stream of consciousnesses are the means of expressing the inner repressions. On the other hand, Reza Baraheni was in a situation that the period before Iran’s revolution in 1979 stood as an era of both courtiers and society’s corruptions for him. Even in 1987 when he sent all his manuscript for the publication, there existed a loophole of a different and better future for him. His dream of a great nation with respect to all its citizens was alive in his mind. This hope made him write a novel that had in fact more descriptive style rather than a subjective narration. Polyphonies in his writings are predominantly of external ones and the present dialogues of characters in his writing make up the majority of his dialogisms.

Theory and Practice in Language Studies

This paper aims at reading Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of voice, especially the concept of “Polyphony”. The main argument is that polyphony is an important key concept to take into consideration to better comprehend the interrelationships of voices between the narrator and the other characters in this novel. In order to prove this argument, the researchers emphasize language and speech diversity in order to shed light on “Heteroglossia”, which is another related concept coined by Bakhtin. The researchers will also examine the characteristics of the double-voicedness and the manifestations of polyphony in the novel. The results show that Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold can be described as a polyphonic novel because of the variety of consciousnesses and independent voices of its various characters. Eventually, the paper shows how the novel demonstrates heteroglot features because of the d...

Moment Dergi, 2017

Iris Murdoch, a writer with a profound understanding of the importance of creating voices/selves, often explored human truths that are timeless in her novels. Bakhtin developed a frame of work in which he mainly aimed at describing a democratic language which was " dialogical " or " carnivalesque ". A world of interchange, of a dialogue between many voices is what Bakhtin hoped for. One of the great contributions of Bakhtin is the concept of polyphony (multivocality or multi-voicedness). He suggests that " the polyphonic novel as a whole is thoroughly dialogical " (Bakhtin, 1973, p. 40). To Bakhtin the language of a culture is full of intersecting language uses-those of class, profession, activity, generation, gender, region and a rich variety of interacting significances. Iris Murdoch's novel Nuns and Soldiers has often been studied in relation to the ethical, moral and philosophical issues. However, it is also significant to explore how these issues are voiced for female characters. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the voices of female characters in Iris Murdoch's Nuns and Soldiers on the basis of Bakhtinian theory of the novel.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415883528/ In this preliminary phenomenology of the experience of an audiobook, I compare the engagement with language with that of reading and listening to a present speaker, as well as approaching the particularities of embodied audiobook listening on its own terms. The process of constructing meaning at the level of individual sentences is treated exhaustively, while the remainder is approached only in its general contours. We see that the audiobook contains its own temporal structure and forms a context in which physical and social experiences become background.