The Discourse Researcher Here and Now

The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Currently, the Bakhtin Circle’s work is understood predominantly as a philosophy of language. However, we know that one of the important foci of Mikhail Bakhtin’s studies over the years was literature. And chronotope is one of Bakhtin’s fundamental categories of analysis used to understand the novel. In literature, he says, time and space are inseparable, and it is in their unity that actual historical persons are found in a “complicated and erratic” way: “[t]he chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic” (1981, p.85).¹

The understanding of the areas where the chronotope operates can be broadened, surpassing the novel’s limits. Time and space in life are also inseparable, and it is in their integration that the discourse researcher is found in a “complicated and erratic” way. This issue of Bakhtiniana (14.2) is an example of how he/she is part of the contemporary chronotope as an attentive and active being in relation to the reality that surrounds him/her, problematizing it and seeking its understanding through the discourses that circulate and constitute it. He/she also observes society’s reception of discourses and dialogues with them. In the communicative interaction that is expressed in the seven articles and two reviews published here, this researcher deals with different aspects of our social, cultural and political reality, encouraging us to reflect on it and to understand it better.

This is done through studies that focus on the discourse of science, politics, literature, women, migrants, social networks, and television series. In the articles, each word is revealed as a “little arena” where clashes of orientation and contradictory values occur (Cf. Vološinov, 1973, p.41).² The authors, as discourse researchers, seek to respond, under different theoretical perspectives, to the themes of our time-space, engaging us in dialogue with them. And if the “reality of cognition is not consummated and always open” (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.277),³ the publication of the articles brings new possibilities of dialogue with the issues addressed, with authors and ourselves - readers and new researchers.

We now turn to how these scientific productions are developed in the articles and reviews published in this issue. At a time when migrations are viewed worldwide as a growing problem, the first text approaches Women’s Writing between the Border and the Non-Place: The Emerging Female Discourses in Italian Migrant Literature. The article, which is authored by Laura Gherlone from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba - Argentina, follows the theoretical perspective developed in the teachings of Y. Lotman, an important Russian semioticist who, having witnessed mass migrations, forced evictions and unprecedented ethnogeographic reconfigurations, as well as variations in linguistic-cultural policies that could or could not integrate the “foreigner,” reflected on the concept of frontier during the process of Soviet Perestroika. Gherlone addresses the literary production of two “intrusive” writers (from the old colonies) in Italy, who choose to write their works in the “foreign” language, Italian. Such cultural hybridity creates a discursive space that uniquely reveals the reader to migrant women.

In the next article, Drummond and Stella: Poetic Experiences, by Nathaly Felipe Ferreira Alves (UNICAMP), the woman-author is also the focus of study. But differently from the first article, it centers in a significant Brazilian poet, Stella Leonardos, whose extensive poetic work was associated with the third generation of Modernism. The text recovers the way Stella relates to tradition, while revealing the relationships between reading / writing in metapoetic rewriting, especially in the way the poet appropriates Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poem Da bomba [From the Bomb]. In the following article, Meme Discourse: (De)Memetizing Antifeminist Ideology, by Dina Maria Martins Ferreira and Marco Antônio Vasconcelos, both from the Universidade Estadual do Ceará - UECE, the authors question a meme from social networks, showing its dialogues with feminist ideology through the concepts of multiliteracy, critical visual literacy, critical social theory, and the metafunctions of visual language.

Following a political path, Roberto Leiser Baronas (UFSCAR), in the article Agritoxins versus Pesticides: Reading Notes about Polemic and Discursive Amemory, takes as object of study the Agritoxin Law and analyzes aspects of the controversy that involved it, in which some understood it as a law on Agritoxin and others as a Poison Package. The author recovers recent discourses on that law in the media and analyzes them in accordance to recent contributions of Ruth Amossy on the argumentative character of the controversy; then, he questions the denomination of the law, grounded on the propositions of Marie-Anne Paveau about the relations between language and morality, especially in what regards the concept of discursive amemory.

The following article, Darwin’s Analogical Argument: The Rhetorical Function between the Artificial and the Natural, approaches the scientific discourse and its proximity to rhetoric. In this text, Gustavo Piovezan, who is from Universidade Federal de Rondônia - UNIR, analyzes the classic work of Charles Darwin, namely, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection (1859), and seeks to show how analogy bases the scientist’s argument on the selective regulation of nature, questioning the logical character of the Darwinian argument. The author presents a perspective of analysis that stems from the rhetorical tradition, particularly from Chaim Perelman’s theory of argumentation.

The next article, written by Jaqueline Stefani and Natalie Oliveira da Cruz, who are both from Universidade de Caxias do Sul - UCS, is titled Understanding and Language in Heidegger: Ex-sistence, Ontological Openness and Hermeneutics. The authors, in a very clear manner, investigate Heideggerian hermeneutics as an approach according to which language is not a mere communication tool. And finally, sociosemiotics is the theoretical basis of analysis of the bizarre episode National Anthem, from the series Black Mirror, conducted in the article, Between the Sensible and the Intelligible: A Semiotic Reading of the Episode The National Anthem of the Series Black Mirror, written by Conrado Moreira Mendes, from the Pontíficia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais - PUC/MG.

Two great reviews complete this issue. The first one, written by Maria Elizabeth da Silva Queijo (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo - PUC/SP), analytically presents the new Brazilian Portuguese translation of the essay Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. This translation, based on the most recent version of this text, edited by Sergey Bocharov and Vadim Kozhinov, was done by Paulo Bezerra and is part of the project developed by the publishing house Editora 34. The second is authored by Anderson Salvaterra Magalhães, who is from the Universidade Federal de São Paulo - UNIFESP. He addresses the work of João Kogawa, Vozes em fragmentos na poesia de Chico: uma arquitetura polifônica? [Voices in Fragments in Chico’s Poetry: A Polyphonic Architecture?], by presenting aspects of the text that encourage us to read it.

This issue gathered 11 authors from 9 institutions (one is international - Argentina, and seven are Brazilian). In the promotion and dissemination of research carried out in the field of discourse, Bakhtiniana, once more, invites everyone - readers, authors and researchers in general - to dialogue with the papers published in this issue. The publication of this issue would be impossible if we could not count with 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. We thank them 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 provide our readers with an excellent issue, which will be confirmed by them. Now that we seek to increase the internationalization and visibility of the journal, a requirement of SciELO and also of PUC-SP, Bakhtiniana remains steadfast in its commitment to promoting dialogical possibilities between national and international research devoted to language studies.

REFERÊNCIAS

• BAKHTIN, M. Teoria do romance II. As formas do tempo e do cronotopo. Tradução, posfácio e notas Paulo Bezerra; organização da edição russa de Serguei Botcharov e Vadim Kójinov. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2018.
• BAKHTIN, M. O problema do conteúdo, do material e da forma na criação literária. In: Questões de literatura e de estética A teoria do romance. Tradução de Aurora Fornoni Bernadini et al 3.ed. São Paulo: Editoria UNESP, 1993, p.13-70.
• 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.

• 1
  BAKHTIN, M. M. Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. In: BAKHTIN, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981. pp.84-258.
• 2
  VOLOŠINOV, V. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
• 3
  BAKHTIN, M. Supplement: The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art. 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.257-326

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 Apr 2019
• Date of issue
  Apr-Jun 2019