"Dialogism at Work: Bakhtinian Interplay of Voices in Wordsworth and Akhavan Sales' Poetry"

"Dialogism at Work: Bakhtinian Interplay of Voices in Wordsworth and Akhavan Sales' Poetry"

Bakhtin looks at literature as a discourse in which one, through what he dubs as heteroglossia, can find a diversity of social speech types, a diversity of individual voicesincluding authorial speech, the speech of narrators, and the speech of characters- and a diversity of languages artistically organized. It is an internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, language of generations and age groups. Within the play of these voices, the reader gets acquainted with multiple perspectives that flourish under such conditions and gets a deeper meaning behind the lines intended by the author. This is what could be traced in both Wordsworthʹs and Mehdi Akhavan Salesʹ poetry. In Wordsworth we come across play of different voices through the voice of an acting consciousness or self which Bakhtin considers to be consisted of a set of conversations, often struggles, of discrepant voices with each other, voices speaking from different positions with different degrees of authority. Similarly, Akhavan Sales permits play of voices through using multiplicity of social voices coming from different social groups, different generations and age groups who come together and, in a dialogical relationship, give voice to their ideas and points of view coming from different consciousnesses. Through a comparative study, therefore, the present research aims at analyzing play of voices in Wordsworthʹs The Prelude and Akhavan Salesʹ Life Says: Still We Must Live in the light of Bakhtinʹs theories of dialogism.