Editorial

I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life.

Mikhail Bakhtin

We are very happy to publish Bakhtiniana 12(1), the first issue of 2017, comprised of articles and book reviews by authors from different research institutions in Brazil and abroad. With this issue, we want to contribute once again to the possibility of a responsible understanding of ethics, aesthetics and science as a unity of human culture, thus promoting a dynamic and interdependent dialogue between these spheres of activity. However, we want to underscore that our objective is to promote and disseminate research in the field of discourse studies, regardless of the theoretical perspective taken. In this issue most authors establish dialogues between Bakhtin's thinking and other concepts that were important then and still are now. We now invite you to a brief presentation of the papers.

Two articles are predominantly theoretical. Ekaterina Vólkova Américo's (UFF/RJ) The Concept of Border in Yuri Lotman's Semiotics dialogues especially with the Russian culture. She presents the concept of border postulated in the work of Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman and the process of assimilation of texts of others in the border area, thus promoting cultural interrelations. This is the case of the French language in Tolstoy's War and Peace and the impact of jeans in Soviet culture. Bakhtin's Dialogism and Vossler's Stylistics by Miriam Puzzo (UNITAU-SP) discusses the possible relationships between two theoretical trends of the early 20th century: Bakhtin's dialogism and Vossler's stylistics. She highlights aspects of Bakhtin's teaching practice in relation to language concept, grammar, and style.

Three other articles discuss Bakhtinian concepts that help understand art and life. How can we understand the tense relationship between an author and a proofreader? Marcelo Spalding Perez (UniRitter/RS) and William Moreno Boenavides's (UFRGS/RS) article The Limits of Proofreading Literary Texts Based on the Concepts of Authorship and Style in Bakhtin examines this issue, showing that today the role of the proofreader can no longer be limited to the normative aspects of writing. Based on Bakhtin's concepts that further the understanding of the limits of the proofreader's intervention, the authors show the importance of observing the "axiological valuation" that is present in the aesthetic object. In Fondamenta degli incurabili: (On Great Time), Tatiana Bubnova (UNAM/México) takes up the notion of great time, a relational anthropological concept, and presents "odd coincidences" that place authors from different chronotopes in dialogue, namely, Francisco Delicado, Cervantes, Sterne, Pushkin, and Joseph Brodsky. According to the author, in this dialogue the researcher's perspective can allow scientific investigation to penetrate Bakhtin's great time. Mary Bricker's (Southern Illinois University/USA) Forms of the Grotesque in The Juniper Tree, which discusses other Bakhtinian themes, such as the grotesque, the life-death-rebirth cycle, the carnivalesque song (in the interpolation of prose and verse), demonstrates their manifold relevance to the plot's moral romantic development and their importance to the understanding of the Brothers Grimm's tale as a whole.

The dialogue between life and art, based on Bakhtin's oeuvre, is also found in three other articles. Renan de Vita Alves de Brito (USJ/SC) and Andréa Vieira Zanella (UFSC/CAPES) share their experiences in conducting aesthetic workshops in a city public school in Florianópolis, SC, Brazil in the article Ethical, Aesthetic and Political Formation in Workshops with Youngsters: Tensions, Transgressions and Concerns in Intervention Research. As they problematize the contribution of the research to the ethical, aesthetic, and political development of the researchers and the students, they highlight the answerability that characterizes the actions of the group and establishes the Otherness condition of existence. In Authorship and Enunciative Responsibility in Reading Journals, Kalliane Sibelli de Amorim Oliveira, Maria Eliete de Queiroz and Maria do Socorro M. Fernandes Barbosa (the three from UERN/RN) establish a relationship between Bakhtin's and Possenti's concept of authorship and the concept of enunciative responsibility proposed by Adam in order to find out how high school students' reading journals can manage the voice of others and use modality resources to attain an authorial discourse. The article "Let's Defeat Traffic": A Verbo-visual Analysis of the Meaning and Theme of a Word on a Cover of Época Magazine by Madeline Gilbert (Middlebury College/Vermont/USA;UTFPR/PR) and Anselmo Lima (UTFPR/PR) takes life as it is reflected and refracted by the press media. By means of a verbo-visual analysis of the meaning and theme of the word tráfico on one of the covers of Época magazine, they emphasize the importance of the social and historical context in the study of the theme of ideological signs insofar as they foster the historical and critical understanding of a specific subject.

The last article is a contribution from Mexico: in the article Religious Word as a Variant of 'Authoritative Word' in Bakhtin, Beatriz Gutiérrez Mueller (BUAP/Puebla/México) seeks to understand religious discourse based on Bakhtin's notion of authoritative word. She thus gives examples of dogmatic utterances that are inherent to religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and especially the Catholic Christianity.

Two book reviews complement and enrich this issue as they let the reader know of important books to the field. José Luiz Fiorin (USP/SP) introduces us to Carlos Alberto Faraco's História sociopolítica da língua portuguesa [Sociopolitical History of the Portuguese Language], published by Parábola Editorial in 2016, and Sônia Caldas Pessoa (UFMG/MG) presents Ida Lúcia Machado's Parodie et Analyse du Discours &391;Parody and Discourse Analysis], published in Paris by L'Harmattan in 2013.

As we do not want to avoid our regular assessment of every issue, Bakhtiniana's first issue of 2017 publishes works of 16 authors from 10 different Brazilian universities (UERN, UFMG, UFF, USP, UNITAU, UTFPR, UFSC, USJ, UNIRITTE, UFRGS) and from four universities abroad (Southern Illinois/USA, Middlebury College/USA; UNAM and BUAP, Mexico). We believe these works provide us with a better understanding of science in its relation to life and art in the unity of human culture.

Once again we would like to thank MCTI/CNPq/MEC/CAPES [Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation/Brazilian National Research Council/The Brazilian Ministry of Education/Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education] and PUC-SP (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo) [Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo], which, through the Deanship of Graduate Studies, has provided us with the necessary support to publish issues of Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso by means of their Plano de Incentivo à Pesquisa [Research Incentive Plan] (PIPEq) / Publicação de Periódicos [Journal Publication] (PubPer-PUCSP) - 2015. We are certain that reading this issue is academically and scientifically productive.

Beth Brait*Maria Helena Cruz Pistori**Bruna Lopes-Dugnani ***Orison Marden Bandeira de Melo Júnior ****

• Translated by Orison Marden Bandeira de Melo Júnior - [e-mail]

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan-Apr 2017