Polyphony (literature)
The term polyphony (also: Polyperspektivismus ) referred to in the literature a structural principle of narrative literature in which the author in relation to its figures occurs heavily in the background. In a polyphonic novel, the characters are not the mouthpiece of the author and do not represent his point of view, but receive their own voice and represent ideas and points of view that are not necessarily those of the author and are largely equivalent to each other. This structure enables the author to split his own contradicting worldview into the diversity of his characters. A polyphonic novel gains dynamism through the diverse dialogues in which the characters enter; in literary studies this characteristic is called dialogicity .
Concept history
In his book Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, first published in 1929 , Mikhail Bakhtin worked out polyphony ( Russian : многоголосие, mnogogolosie ) as a characteristic structural principle of the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky . He took the term from musicology, where polyphony denotes a polyphony method of composition, and dispensed with an exact systematic literary-scientific definition of the term, which he instead tried to illustrate metaphorically using various examples from Dostoyevsky's work. Bakhtin further explained that with Dostoevsky, human individuality is formed and changed through the changing encounters and dialogues between people and other people and is therefore never closed.
This thesis was opposed u. a. Horst-Jürgen Gerigk , who discovered no evidence of a polyphonic structure in Dostoyevsky's novels and who took the view that, on the contrary, Dostoyevsky's views were clearly recognizable in his novels.
The literary polyphony marks a changed self-understanding of the author in modern and postmodern literature and his changed relationship to the text and to the characters working in it, as it would later become even clearer in concepts such as the intentional fallacy or the death of the author . At the same time, Bakhtin's concept of polyphony can also be seen as a critique of Russian formalism , with which he wanted to direct attention away from the supposedly homogeneous linguistic community towards an ideologically heterogeneous society.
Examples
Viktor Žmegač has James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) as the classified polyphonic novel par excellence. André Gide's novels are also strongly polyphonic.
literature
- Mikhail Bahktin: Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics . Translated from the Russian by Adelheid Schramm. Hanser, Munich 1971, ISBN 3-446-11402-5 .
- Horst-Jürgen Gerigk: Dostojewskij, the "tricky Russian" . The history of its impact in the German-speaking area from the fin de siècle to today. Attempto, Tübingen 2000, ISBN 3-89308-329-4 .
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c Christa Ebert: Literature in Eastern Europe . Russia and Poland. Oldenbourg Akademieverlag, 2010, ISBN 978-3-05-004537-5 , p. 135 . ( limited online version in Google Book Search)
- ↑ Dialogicity. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 17, 2013 ; Retrieved December 11, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ see against polyphony already: Wacław Lednicki: Russia, Poland and the West . Hutchinson, London 1954, pp. 143 .
- ↑ Terry Eagleton: Introduction to Literary Theory . 4th edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-476-14246-9 , pp. 98 f .
- ↑ Viktor Žmegač: The European novel . History of his poetics. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1991, p. 314, 371 .
