Abstract:
This paper represents an attempt to explore Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas in the process of interpretation of some selected Farsi poems by a few contemporary Iranian poets. In so doing, the paper first seeks to cast a rapid glance at Bakhtin's era, which shaped his literary philosophical views then it continues with a brief discussion of some of the characteristic features of his ideology, namely intertextuality, heteroglossia, dualism, and carnivalesque. While dealing with the pragmatic meaning of the poems, the theme of centripetal and the centrifugal forces of language was addressed in a bid to illustrate the fact how the poet by deviating from the conventional codes of language system, i.e. by estrangement, manages to convey his intentional meaning that would have otherwise ceased to fascinate the reader. Finally, the decontextualized rationality in order to highlight the significant role of voice in sociocultural approach, the legacy of Vygotsky, to the genesis of mind, which goes a long way in the interpretive process of poetry were discussed.
Machine summary:
"One more distinctive feature between the novel and the history is that the language of the novel is not uniform; rather, it is a mixture of voices, the notion that is captured in polyglossia, Bakhtin uses the term ranzorecivost while discussing Pushkin's Evgeni Onegin, which is a versified account of various forms and ways of living of Russian people, resonant with different voices, and replete with dialogic systems, images, styles, and types of consciousness.
It is better to end this induction to the selected Farsi poems with a reference to Michael Holquist's (1990) view in this regard: At the heart of everything Bakhtin said … [there is] an almost Manichean sense of opposition at a ceaseless battle between centrifugal forces that seek to keep things apart, and the centripetal forces that strive to make things cohere.
To put a finishing touch to this paper, I may add that Bakhtin, in his conception of multiplicity of meaning, comes to rub shoulders with some contemporary Western thinkers like Austin (How to do things with words, 1962)6, Searl (Speech Acts, 1969)7, and Grice (Logic and Conversation, 1975)8, who are basically concerned with the volatile relationship between form and function, bolstered by contextual variables.
Bearing this in mind, each of the poems given above can be viewed differently in the spotlight of Bakhtin's conception of meaning which is created in the relation between two bodies: the physical and the ideological, sign and value, sentence and utterance, language system and verbal behavior, reference rules and expression rules, centripetal and centrifugal forces of language, linguistically variables and contextual variable."