Laughter is a "detaching, humbling, individuating force" that helps us to modestly situate ourselves in relation to others and hence it promotes and encourages
dialogism, itself a prerequisite for Bakhtin in the creation of knowledge.
As the editors of Carnivalizing Difference explain, "carnival,
dialogism, heteroglossia, and the rest continue to roll off the tongues, and out from under the keyboard-caressing fingers, of scholars and graduate students who find in them a useful analytical framework which does not in itself need to be interrogated" (10).
Chapter 3, tellingly titled "Toward a Theory of Rehearsal:
Dialogism, Power, and Suspension" (italics mine), is apparently Baker-White's attempt to incorporate the same nontotalizing dynamic in his criticism that he detects in rehearsal.
In his preface he says that Bakhtin's conception of the novel in terms of "the dialogic imagination" provides "a critical language with which to discuss the ways in which fictional and political praxis are combined explicitly in La Guma's apartheid narratives, [that is], the
dialogism of the novel in the face of the monologism of apartheid." At the same time, La Guma's novels may be read, Yousaf argues, in the light of Fanon's defense of violence as the only true liberation from colonialism and as a reflection of the development of La Guma's political vision as the novels express it.
Kyle Glover's chapter effectively adapts Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of
dialogism to the needs of environmental discourse, which is necessarily a "rhetoric of diversity." This diversity finds adequate expression only in "a dialogic rhetoric in which different points of view can interact within a single piece of discourse" (p.
Besides, the fundamental oneness and authority of the Proustian "I" might be said to contradict the boundless
dialogism also associated with Bakhtin.
(Sixty years ago, to he sure, pyschoanalysis was considered subversive in some academic circles.) More interesting to me is Mimica's criticism of my use of Bakhtinian
dialogism (the attraction to which was partly inspired by my interest in Gregory Bateson's ideas about interaction, schismogenesis, etc.).
Arnold's
dialogism is most apparent in his tone, "the way he combines a confrontational message with an urbane manner" (7).
At the same time, there is the implication that her commitment to
dialogism is strong; strong enough to invite the sorts of questioning interventions such as those noted above--interventions that in no way diminish the text but are more like questions provoked in the reader's mind by it.