During the period in which Leavis w

During the period in which Leavis was writing, Mikhail Bakhtin was developing radically different ways of talking about literature (though his ideas did not become available to Western critics until much later). In his emphasis on the dialogic, Bakhtin’s analysis foregrounds the social context of interpretation, functioning under the designation heteroglossia. In the following passage from perhaps his best-known work, '['he Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin succinctly explains how hctcroglossia works in the novel: “as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.... Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help hctcroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized).”1