What is an utterance and what is it's value? The brief dialogue above contains a number of utterances that were never spoken, which only ever existed within my own conscious mind and now in text. I could have kept going because the final utterance could be paired with a response.
Bakhtin grappled with the nature of the utterance and its place in interpreting speech genres. He said that utterances are the vehicles through which "language is realized" (60). His idea of what an utterance is, however, was never entirely nailed down. He suggests that utterances may span from complex forms such as the novel to single words. He emphasizes the role of the actively responsive listener in relation to the speaker, claiming that the unit of an utterance is defined by the boundaries of the change of spaking subjects. Speaking subjects may shift within a single text by a single author and may shift from sentence to sentence, Bakhtin says. So, though I do not remember him ever saying this explicitly, an utterance is that which can be recognized by an actively responsive listener as something which may be responded to. As seen above, this may be as simple as a single word or as a complex (run-on) sentence. Taken out of context, however, one of these utterances will not be recognized as an utterance which warrants a response. For this reason Bakhtin says, "any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances" (69). This natural quality of utterances, which are the foundations of all speech, lends itself to the manifestation of speech genres.
2 comments:
Peter, I am really interested in the brain wave I got swept into while reading through the dialogue you provided at the beginning of your post.
Bakhtin talks a lot about how most speech genre's do not allow for individuality through utterance, with the exception of literary-artistic ones (63).
Which intrigues me because your dialogue seems to fit most perfectly within the speech genre category of "Everyday" (mostly because we can all imagine this conversation taking place, or have heard it with our own two ears while walking about campus), yet anyone who reads this short conversation grasps immediately at the individuality of the main speaker: His eyes enjoy beholding women, he enjoys dreaming of them listening to Miles Davis with him, and imagining they will be over-come by the sexiness of the music and as a result take him to bed.
Does the reader's ability to tap into this person's individuality, raise the esteem of this discourse you have provided into the speech genre realm of literary-artistic?
Or Should Bakhtin rethink his argument that Everyday along with other speech genres only include individual style in their utterances by mistake or unintentionally (63) ?
I think that there is room to believe that speakers in everyday speech hold more agency than Bakhtin gives them credit. That for example when this main speaker in your dialogue approaches this beautiful women and says, "Hey are you into Miles Davis?" He is intentionally uttering an element in his speech which encompasses his individual style, in the hopes that she will respond "Yes. I do, my favorite track is Honkey Tonk."
"My Ass?, I wouldn't lay my Ass on the line for all the beautiful Girls in the Desert. I will, however bet you my burro. He's stubborn as an Ass and I have no use for him."
I actively responded responded to you text, because I like the direction your "chain of utterances" was going, and I wanted to jump in with my own utterances. I think if your characters were actively speaking in person, the exchange of utterances would be a simple speech genre, but since we are communicating through in text based dialogue, the speech genre is more literary/commentarial (and therefore more complex.) Good choice in using dialogue as an example, I think Bahktin would approve because he says that in dialogue, "Each rejoinder, regardless of how brief and abrupt, has a specific quality of completion that expresses a particular position of the speaker, to which one may respond or may assume, with respect to it, a responsive position."
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