Putting a discarded roll-up classroom map on your wall and Bakhtin

First, I am not incriminating myself of ever having stolen a discarded political map of South America from Woodburn Hall earlier this week.  I am simply using that hypothetical situation to grapple with Bakhtin's idea of heteroglossia, performance, and whatever else I come up with.

Let's pretend that I stole a roll-down classroom map from WH which was in pretty rough shape.  The thing won't roll up very easily, it's ripped and creased in multiple places, it's old, and it's in Spanish.  I considered cutting the important map section from the rest of the apparatus so that I would then have a sweet colorful canvas poster to put on my wall.

I decided not to do this, however, because I read Bakhtin who spoke to me about the map as if it were a novel.  He said, "This map is beautiful and valuable in its entirety.  Some may want you to look at it as a map of Brasil, others as a map of the oceans because the map is mostly oceans, and still others will tell you that this most certainly is a map of the correlation between the continental watershed and the development of the populations in South America.  But it is much more."

He told me that this map must be studied by cartographers (I'm correlating the study of English with cartography) so that the entire map is appreciated not only in the accuracy, the color choices, and the information provided, but in its entirety--including the apparatus by which it hangs. The map, like a novel, is a complex symbol composed of the maker's choices of information by his own hand but done in a way which was reliant on both common knowledge and his understanding of the world in reality.

The map is a sort of manifestation of heteroglossia.  It is layered with many types of communication including the geographical coordinate system, road systems, rivers, cities, and so forth.  Each provide information to contribute to the whole while maintaining a unique perspective, like different languages in a novel.