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Miller 1 Dara Miller Professor Johnson-Gonzalez ENG 472 15 April 2012 Bahktin and Lowells For the Union

Dead In Mikhail Bahktins essay, Discourse in the Novel, he closely examines the relationship between language and style, challenges the idea that prose authors can control the stylistic interpretations of a novel, and identifies several key differences between poetic and novelistic form. Although he claims, The novel is an artistic genre, he clarifies that it is not a form of artistry that fit[s] within the framework provided by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists (1083). In his view of poetry, he asserts, The poet is a poet insofar as he accepts the idea of a unitary and singular language and a unitary, monologically sealed-off utterance, and Each word must express the poets meaning directly and without mediation; there must be no distance between the poet and his word (1103). This idea of poetry as strip[ping] the word of others intentions (1103) contrasts directly with his view of novelistic language, which he perceives as part of a universal dialogical conversation in which the word in language is half someone elsesit is populated overpopulated with the intentions of others (1101). However, in light of a poem such as Robert Lowells For the Union Dead, Bahktins ideas about prosaic language seems to apply much more aptly than do his ideas about poetic language. In For the Union Dead, Lowell writes on a topic that cannot forget its previous life in any other contexts, (1104) as Bahktin claims poetic language should, because the essence of the poem is intricately wrapped in the visual context of the Robert Gould Shaw

Miller 2 Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts, the historical context of both the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, and the long and ongoing history of white privilege in between. The poem, with its haunting imagery of the Aquarium and the blurred line between social progress and regress, does not, as Bahktin would want it to, realize itself as something about which there can be no doubt (1095). Rather, the poems language creates doubt; in the speakers movements through the recent past, the historical past, and the present, he reveals his own doubts about the ideals of democracy and his own place in society. The poem contests with issues of injustice, and haven taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, it cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads and becomes itself an active participant in the social dialogue (Bahktin 1089). It moves from the monument, which ironically honors the white Colonel Shaw yet still sticks like a fishbone / in the citys throat (Lowell) because of its association with the struggle for racial equality, to the disturbing image of the commercialization of Hiroshimas bombing, to the still-present struggle for equality demanded by the drained faces of Negro school-children, and finally to the speakers view of present day society a mindless mass characterized by savage servility and reminiscent of reptiles crawling through primordial slime. The poem, with all of its societal implications and questioning, seems to fit much more into the social atmosphere that Bakhtin assigns to artistic prose, harmonizing with some of the elementsand striking a dissonance with the others (1089). However, this does not appear to make it any less poetic than a poem in which the language is an obedient organ, fully adequate to the authors intention (1095). Works Cited

Miller 3 Bahktin, Mikhail. Discourse in the Novel. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010. Print. Lowell, Robert. For the Union Dead. Poetry.org. The Academy of American Poets, 2012. 15 April 2012. Web.

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