Bakhtin A Response to a question from Novy Mir Editorial Staff Shaily Parihar 12.09.

2013 Bakhtin claims that literary scholarship should liberate the author from the captivity of his epoch, his own culture because a work of art gains its full significance when we can see its roots extended in the distant past and also when it continues to live in distant future, in great time. The author believes that if a literary work is not studied in the light of its past and future, then it loses its significance. Using the example of Shakespeare, he says that Shakespeare is not just studied in the framework of Elizabethan era; he is the great Shakespeare because he is been given new meanings and new significance in eras after Elizabethan age. According to Bakhitn, semantic depths are hidden in each culture and are concealed from the artists and readers of his time. It is only in future that these semantic layers are revealed. For example, in Shakespeare, he says that semantic depths were not only hidden in the literary language but also in the popular language that had not entered in literary works of his time. We see that Freuds concept of Oedipal Complex is used for analysing Shakespeares Hamlet. The play has been said to portray the protagonist with unresolved oedipal complexes. Also, Shakespeares sonnet developed out of Petrarchan sonnet and over time, various poets experimented with sonnet form, for example, Victorian poet G. M. Hopkins developed Curtal Sonnet and Rupert Brooke formed Sonnet Reversed. This idea of semantic depths also reminds us of Walter Benjamins essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he says that interpretation of art changes over time because art has no pure meaning and its meaning is incarnated in the moment of reception and, therefore, the uniqueness of art or its aura continues to persist. In the end, Bakhtin says that in order to better understand a culture one must see it as an outsider because our reality is best understood by the other. He further says that a meaning only reveals its depths once... they engage in a dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. This brings Bakhtins concept of Polyphonic or Hetroglossia into focus, which refers to the interactive nature of multiplicity and plurality of voices or discourses. A monologic work is unable to represent diverse viewpoints and a dialogic work represents contrary viewpoints and is more meaningful than the single mindedness of a monologue. For example, the concept of other has been deconstructed by post colonial writers. Edward Said in his Orientalism demonstrated how the East and Middle Eastern people have been stereotyped by the West and how it facilitated colonization and justified imperial domination of oriental people. Bhabha uses the term hybridity or third space to stress the interdependence of the colonizer and the colonized and challenges the colonial rigidity. Prior to Post-colonial theory, western civilization had been the oppressive authority with its monologue, but now contrary and diverse view points of post colonialism made hetroglossia possible and multiple voices of various cultures make dialogue meaningful.