The Other-for-Me and the I-for-the-Other

I live in a world of others' words. And my entire life is an orientation in this world, a reaction to others' words [...]

Mikhail Bakhtin ¹

To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another.

Mikhail Bakhtin ²

Who is the other-for-me? Who is the I-for-the-other? How do discourses in life, arts, sciences and media, both print and digital, help us to understand and to try and answer these questions, especially in contemporaneity? Based on those questions, Bakhtiniana's 14.1 issue, the first in 2019, gathers discursive studies from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, embracing important investigations. Some studies have taken their object from the digital world, either focusing on the recognition and investigation of identity politics - which involve matters of recognition, affirmation and values of the "I-for-myself, the other-for-me, and I-for-the-other" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.54)³ and discuss themes of feminism, male chauvinism, racism, violence and oppression, poverty - or on the themes of popular science and teaching proposals. Therefore, the present number exposes a social-political and cultural moment filled with tension in which every word reveals itself as a "little arena" for the clash and crisscrossing of contradictory orientation and values (cf. Vološinov, 1973, p.41).⁴ In this issue, three articles avoid the virtual realm although one of them deals with literature on the "narrative of pain" in proximity to other articles that somehow approach pain and trauma in the digital net. The remaining two articles debate more discursive aspects: the slim border between plagiarism and originality in literature (alien discourse) (cf. Vološinov, 1973, p. 115-140;⁵ BAKHTIN, 1984, p. 181-203)⁶ and authorship in a school newspaper from the 1950s.

Let us present the articles. In Lynching Network: Human Rights and Midiatic Effect Viviane de Melo Resende (Universidade de Brasília - UnB, Departamento de Linguística, Português e Línguas Clássicas) and María del Pilar Tobar Acosta (Instituto Federal de Brasília) examine, by means of critical discourse analysis, a chain of discursive events on Facebook and television concerning a notorious case of lynching that victimized a 15-year-old teenage boy in Rio de Janeiro. Discourse analyses provide new insights onto the binomial poverty-violence, their articulation in the media and its repercussion on the streets. Social networks are also the origin for the corpus of Irony as a Zone of Confrontation between Different Voices/Voicings in Facebook Comments. Written by André Cordeiro dos Santos (Instituto Federal de Alagoas - Campus Piranhas / Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Maceió), Girllaynne Gleyca Bezerra dos Santos Marques (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Centro de Artes e Comunicação, Departamento de Letras, Recife) and Siane Gois Cavalcanti Rodrigues (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Centro de Artes e Comunicação, Departamento de Letras, Recife), the article analyzes comments posted on an anonymous (spotted) Facebook page. Based on Bakhtinian concepts of language, the article also presents a good review on the notion of irony and the so-called rape culture and its myths. In addition, it creatively shows the dialogue between those three concepts and highlights how irony in the messages builds zones of tension between utterances and works as a discourse of resistance for women against male chauvinist discourses.

In New Paths for Science: A Contrastive Discourse Analysis of Modifications in Popularizing Science through Digital Media, by Sheila Grillo (Universidade de São Paulo - USP/SP, Faculdade de Filosofia Letras e Ciências Humanas, São Paulo) and Beatriz Amorim de Azevedo e Silva (Universidade de São Paulo - USP/SP, Faculdade de Filosofia Letras e Ciências Humanas, São Paulo), the web once again provides the authors with investigative material. They analyze videos of popular science produced by two YouTube channels, a Brazilian - Nerdologia and an American - Scishow, exposing through the theoretical precepts of the Bakhtin Circle and the theoretical-methodological proposal of contrastive discourse analysis how they present the transmission of alien discourse. In pointing out similarities and differences between the videos, cultural and discursive differences are noted regarding audience and assumed interlocutors.

It is a great pleasure to present the next article, our first directly in Russian, also published in Portuguese and English, Bakhtiniana's official languages. Formation of the Image of the Russian World as an Aspect of Sociocultural Adaptation of Foreigners in the Process of Teaching the Russian Language was written by Nina Kozlovtseva and Natália Tolstov both from Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia. Their article approaches important aspects in the teaching of Russian, particularly the stereotyping of the "Russian world," thus generating awareness for problems common to language teaching in general and the ones specific to the teaching of Russian. The article informs us of the growing number of foreigners in Russian higher education institutions, and the role of prep colleges. Among various teaching strategies, it also emphasizes the eduteinment (teaching through entertainment), which suggests the insertion of various contemporary digital tools, both technical and didactic.

Apart from the web, Memory, Catastrophe and Narratives of Pain: Primo Levi, Riobaldo and The Ghosts in the Experience of Trauma, by Rogério Borges (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Goiás - PUC-Goiás, Escola de Comunicação, Goiânia, Goiás) and Gustavo Castro (Universidade de Brasília - UnB, Faculdade de Comunicação, Brasília, Distrito Federal), approaches characters from testimonial works - Primo Levi's - and fictional works - Riobaldo from Grande sertão: veredas by Guimarães Rosa. The authors broaden the reading of these works by associating their discourses through a multidisciplinary approach - narrative theory and knowledge of affection and memory -thus revealing their effective links. The international literature by the Quebecker author Réjean Ducharme, French-Canadian, is the focus of the article How to Plagiarize and Not Lose Originality - Bakhtin's Dialogical Discourse and the Statute of the Bastard - In Memory of Réjean Ducharme by Arnaldo Rosa Vianna Neto (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Centro de Estudos Gerais, Instituto de Letras, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro). His reflections on originality and intertextuality regarding the Canadian writer stem from the theoretical discussion of the literary discourse, using multidimensional and interdisciplinary Bakhtinian concepts. Finally, Tânia M. Barroso Ruiz, Portuguese consultant and PhD by Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina - UFSC, uses a school newspaper published from 1945 to 1950 in a school in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, to discuss, from a Bakhtinian perspective, the issue of authorship and to define whether students' voices were expressed in the newspaper, as it is stated in its title, viz., Institutional Authorship in the School Newspaper O Colegial, a Publication by Colégio Catarinense Students (1945-50).

Two reviews complete this issue. The first by Xoán Carlos Lagares (Universidade Federal Fluminense - UFF, Instituto de Letras, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro) presents Para conhecer norma linguística [To Know Linguistic Norms], a book organized by Carlos Alberto Faraco and Ana Maria Zilles; the second, written by Fernanda Taís Brignol Guimarães (Centro Universitário Ritter dos Reis - UniRitter, Porto Alegre), focuses on the collection Livro Didático: olhares dialógicos [Textbook: Dialogical Views], organized by Anderson Silva and Elizangela Costa.

The current issue gathers 13 authors, from 12 different institutions (eleven in Brazil and one abroad). Before concluding the editorial, there is important news: beginning in 2019, Bakhtiniana becomes a quarterly journal with four annual issues. Such a change aims at accommodating research demands expressed in the volume of submissions and the expectations of our indexers.

In promoting and publishing research on discourse studies, Bakhtiniana proposes its readers, authors and researchers in general a dialogue with the investigations published in the current issue. Our context remains unaltered; therefore, we again highlight that due to current national difficulties, the present issue would not have been possible without 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 from PUC-SP (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo) [Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo] through its Plano de Incentivo à Pesquisa [Research Incentive Plan] (PIPEq) / Publicação de Periódicos [Journal Publication] (PubPer-PUCSP), 2018, both of which have our gratitude. In addition, the great volume of submissions and their careful selection by capable and collaborative reviewers, either ad hoc or from our Board of Reviewers, allowed for an excellent outcome, as the reader will verify. As internationalization and visibility demanded by SciELO and other indexers are within its reach, Bakhtiniana reassures its commitment to creating dialogical possibilities for research on language, both national and international.

• Translated by Larissa de Pinho Cavalcanti - [e-mail]
• 1
  BAKHTIN, M. From notes made in 1970-71. In: BAKHTIN, M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Mikhail Bakhtin. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin, TX: Texas University Press, 1986,. p. 143.
• 2
  BAKHTIN, M. Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book. In: BAKHTIN, M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. p. 287.
• 3
  BAKHTIN, M. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin, TX: Texas University Press, 1993.
• 4
  VOLOŠINOV, V. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
• 5
  For reference, see note 4.
• 6
  BAKHTIN, M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

REFERÊNCIAS

• BAKHTIN, M. Fragmentos dos anos 1970-1971. In: BAKHTIN, M. Notas sobre literatura, cultura e ciências humanas Organização, tradução, posfácio e notas de Paulo Bezerra; notas da edição russa de Serguei Botcharov. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2017, p.21-56.
• BAKHTIN, M. Reformulação do livro sobre Dostoiévski. In: BAKHTIN, M. Estética da criação verbal 4 ed. Introdução e tradução de Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006, p.337-357.
• BAKHTIN, M. Para uma filosofia do ato responsável Tradução aos cuidados de Valdemir Miotello e Carlos Alberto Faraco. São Carlos: Pedro & João Editores, 2010.
• BAKHTIN, M. Problemas da poética de Dostoiévski 4 ed. Tradução de Paulo Bezerra. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2008.
• VOLÓCHINOV, V. Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem Problemas fundamentais do método sociológico na ciência da linguagem. Tradução, notas e glossário de Sheila Grillo e Ekaterina Vólkova Américo. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2017.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan-Mar 2019