SOURCE: Zoreda, Margaret Lee. “Bakhtin, Blobels and Philip K. Dick¹.” Journal of Popular Culture 28, no. 3 (winter 1994): 55-61.

In the following essay, Zoreda employs Bakhtin's idea of dialogism to analyze Dick's story “Oh, To Be a Blobel!”

One of the notable contributions of the philosopher, linguist and literary theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin to cultural studies has been his unique and ubiquitous concept of dialogism: the encounter-juxtaposition of autonomous entities, whether words, sentences, discourses, subjects or cultures, that without merging conserve their identities in a mutually enriching bond (“Response” 7). As Morson and Emerson have remarked, he is explicitly not referring to a synthesis or convergence of points of view, and much less to a dialectic; such an event would result monologic and not dialogic (55-56). In order to foster the likelihood of dialogism, or creative understanding, Bakhtin favors outsideness as a stance: the necessity of ultimately placing ourselves outside whatever we...