SOURCE: Keyssar, Helene. “Drama and the Dialogic Imagination: The Heidi Chronicles and Fefu and Her Friends.” Modern Drama 34, no. 1 (March 1991): 88-106.

In the following essay, Keyssar contrasts the semiotic differences between The Heidi Chronicles and Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends, refuting the contention by philosopher-critic Mikhail Bakhtin that all dramatic literature is “monologic” by demonstrating the confluence between Bakhtinian criticism and contemporary feminist thought.

I first came to know the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin in the mid-seventies.¹ Increasingly hailed as one of the most daring and profound philosopher-critics of the twentieth century, Bakhtin was difficult to read but easy to admire.² Indeed, as striking as has been the growing interest in Bakhtin's ideas has been the range of people whose interest he has aroused—feminists and nonfeminists, Marxists and anti-Marxists, modernists and postmodernists, social scientists, linguists, psychologists, literary critics and philosophers. Few seemed to notice that...