Seeking Meanings: Possible Dialogues

A meaning only reveals its depth once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures.

Mikhail Bakhtin

The geographical-cultural route traced by the authors who contributed with their research to this issue of Bakhtiniana (13.2) starts in the distant Middle East - Iran, continues in Europe - Italy, America - Puerto Rico (San José), Chile (Santiago) and ends in Brazil (São Paulo, Mato Grosso, and Rio Grande do Sul). Bakhtin teaches us that "the unity of a particular culture is an open unity" (1986, p.6; emphasis in original)¹. In this sense, our time is the same, but the spaces where these different researchers live make our cultures different. Thus, the dialogue established by the 10 texts published in this issue allows and contributes to the enrichment of each unity in its own integrity (BAKHTIN, 1986, p.7)². What brings them together is their common concern for language and its functioning, for the different language productions and the produced meanings, and above all their common interest for an in-depth understanding of the production, circulation and reception of different discourses in their historically and socially wide and specific spheres - in short, their common understanding of how ethics and aesthetics are united to knowledge, thus producing human culture (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.1).³

Bakhtinian thinking and certainly other theoretical-discursive perspectives offer us the possibility to theoretically reflect upon language, literature and, fundamentally, the discourses that penetrate and constitute us. With the certainty that the meanings produced in the articles "[surmount] the closedness and one-sidedness" (BAKHTIN, 1986, p.7)⁴ of our cultures, we present them now. They have been grouped in three basic thematic sets: (preferably) theoretical reflections, literature, and education.

Openly oriented towards the understanding of the notion of utterance in the Circle's oeuvre, Antonia Larraín (a professor of the Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago) and Andrés Haye (a professor of the Escuela de Psicología, Pontifícia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago) carry out an in-depth and relevant study entitled Field and Utterance: The Problem of Discourse Articulation. They develop the notion of discursive fields, thus mobilizing concepts of Bakhtin and Voloshinov and the philosophy of Bergson, Simondon, and Deleuze. They aim to understand how, in a concrete utterance, responses are unrepeatable but not unprecedented acts, insofar as they recreate given words. Triggered by Paulo Bezerra's new translation of Discourse in the Novel (BAKHTIN, 2015),⁵ Lucas Vinício de Carvalho Maciel (the coordinator of the Bachelor's Program in Linguistics, Universidade Federal de São Carlos - UFSCar), in Considerations on Heterodiscourse from Don Quixote, discusses some aspects of the concept of heterodiscourse (plurilinguism or heteroglossia in other translations of the essay) and states that it encompasses different phenomena. He gives examples of his approach with excerpts from two books commonly referenced as Don Quixote de La Mancha. Micah Corum, an English and Linguistics professor from the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, presents a study on creole as discourse in Cultivating Ambiguity: Notes on Issues of Complexity in Creole Discourse. This article, based on a chronotopic (Bakhtinian) and unfinalized view of grammar, is a response to the debate around the complexity and/or simplicity of pidgin and creole grammars. In the theoretical text Discussions on Dialogism Aroused by the Book La herencia de Bajtín: reflexiones y migraciones, Adail Sobral, a professor of the Graduate Program in Languages from the Universidade Católica de Pelotas/RS, raises some questions about dialogism, which were provoked by the reading of the recent work of Olga Pampa Arán, from the Universidade Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. The comments he makes on the several articles that comprise Arán's book and their authors ask for reflections worth a close read.

The two articles related to literary studies in this issue are authored by non-Brazilian scholars. American literature, more especifically African American literature, is brought to the fore in "troubling the waters": The Magic of Remembering the Past in Leon Forrest's Two Wings to Veil My Face, written by the Iranian professors Mohsen Hanif (from the Department of Foreign Languages of the Kharazmi University, Tehran) and Tahereh Rezaei (from the Department of English Literature of the Allameh Tabatabaí University, Tehran). By polemicizing about the possibility of retrieving an "authentic African American identity," the authors underscore how Forrest's magical realism reveals voices of the past, silenced for a long time, and constructs a contemporary identity. And Maria da Graça Gomes de Pina, a specialist in Linguistics and a collaborator of the Università degli Studi di Napoli "l'Orientale," takes us to the plastic art of European futurism from the early 20th century. In her article, several points of Marinetti's Manifesto invite the comparison between the works of Italian Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) and Portuguese Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887-1918), which aim at the dynamics of the human body portrayed in art.

We know that Bakhtinian studies have a significant influence on education in Brazil. This is easily proven by the fact that there are authors discussing education based on dialogism in almost every issue of Bakhtiniana. This issue is no different, as three articles stem from research in Applied Linguistics under the Bakhtinian perspective. Jozanes Assunção Nunes (an expert in educational issues of the Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso) establishes a dialogue between official documents and the professors who are responsible for the implementation of the pedagogical project of the undergraduate language teacher education programs in Voices in Confrontation in Structuring Professoriate Groups of Undergraduate Language Teacher Education Programs: Between the Prescribed and the Institutionalized Practice. This is a timely text, especially when reforms and the teaching quality of higher education in Brazil are being discussed. Elizangela Patrícia Moreira da Costa (a professor from the Languages Department, Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso) analyzes textbooks and verbal-visual reading activities critically in Verbal-visuality from a Reading Perspective: (De)Construction of the Active and Creative Understanding of the Text. And Regina Braz Rocha, a textbook author, puts forward a "non-indifferent" proposition of working with texts in the classroom based on active-dialogic understanding in Style, Expressivity and Axiology in the Teaching/Learning Process of Language in Use.

Finally, this issue is brought to a close with a book review of the new translation of Marxism and Philosophy of Language. Fundamental Problems of the Sociological Method in the Science of Language (by Voloshinov) into Brazilian Portuguese is done by Maria Helena Cruz Pistori (the associate editor of Bakhtiniana, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo), who compares the new translation of Voloshinov's work, done directly from Russian by Sheila Grillo and Ekaterina Vólkova Américo, with the former translation of the book.

As we usually do, we finish this editorial with an assessment of the issue. 12 authors and 12 institutions (six are Brazilian and six, international) are represented in this issue. As Bakhtiniana promotes and disseminates research carried out in the field of discourse, it also invites everyone - readers, authors and researchers in general - to dialogue with the papers published in this issue. Our context has not changed; therefore, we would like to remember again that, despite the current difficulties Brazil is facing, the publication of this issue is only made possible through the financial support from 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], by means of their Plano de Incentivo à Pesquisa [Research Incentive Plan] (PIPEq) / Publicação de Periódicos [Journal Publication] (PubPer-PUCSP) - 2018, whom we thank gratefully. We reiterate that the high number of submissions and the rigorous selection of papers, done by competent and cooperative reviewers either ad hoc or from our Board of Reviewers, allowed us to present our readers with an excellent issue, which will be confirmed by them. Now that the internationalization and visibility of the journal, a requirement of SciELO, is close to be achieved, Bakhtiniana remains steadfast in its commitment to promoting dialogical possibilities between national and international research devoted to language studies.

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

• 1
  BAKHTIN. M. Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff. In: BAKHTIN. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michal Holquist and translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986, pp.1-9.
• 2
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 3
  BAKHTIN, M. Art and Answerability. In: BAKHTIN, M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov and translated by Vadim Liapunov. Supplement translated by Kenneth Brostrom. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990, pp.1-3.
• 4
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 5
  TN. The reference of this new Brazilian Portuguese translation is BAKHTIN, M. O discurso no romance. In: BAKHTIN, M. Teoria do romance I: a estilística. Tradução, prefácio, notas e glossário de Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2015, pp.19-241. The reference of the essay in English is BAKHTIN, M. Discourse in the Novel. In: BAKHTIN, M. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981, pp.259-422.
• Translated by Orison Marden Bandeira de Melo Júnior - [e-mail]

REFERÊNCIAS

• BAKHTIN, M. A ciência da literatura hoje (Resposta a uma pergunta da revista Novi Mir). In: BAKHTIN, M. Notas de literatura, cultura e ciências humanas Trad. Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2017, p.9-19.
• ________. O discurso no romance. In: BAKHTIN, M. Teoria do romance I: A estilística. Trad. Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2015, p.19-241.
• ________. Arte e responsabilidade. In: BAKHTIN, M. Estética da criação verbal. Trad. Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006, p.XXXIII-XXXIV.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  May-Aug 2018