SOURCE: Hirschkop, Ken. “Is Dialogism for Real?” Social Text 30 (1992): 102-13.

In the following essay, Hirschkop examines the conflation of dialogue and dialogism in Bakhtin's work and in the academic discourse that has subsequently developed around it.

Is dialogism for real? In one sense, absolutely. How could one doubt it when discussion of this concept and of its most well known theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, has given rise to such a torrent of articles, books, conferences and commentary? It's for real at least in the sense that, say, the 1986 Mets or rap turned out to be “for real,” its phenomenal success as a theoretical concept indicating it was an idea whose time had come. But even rap and the Mets, however dynastic their ambitions may have been, never claimed to have been there all along; the concept of dialogism, on the other hand, claims to identify a feature of language...