Dialogic Clash between Reading and Writing: Manifestation of Discourse Ethics Based on the Bakhtin Circle

Abstract

Based on concepts of the Bakhtin Circle, this investigation discusses the relationship between reading and writing. Based on the key concepts of dialogism, exotopy, authorship etc., it was perceived that reading and writing are kinds of social action with an ethical dimension. For the Circle, reading and writing are creative and dialogical processes, as the reader and the author enter into a deep dialogue in which positions, often in opposition, enter into confrontation. On reading a text, the reader does so based on his/her cultural repertoire, mediating the act of reading through different slants: context, gender, social group, axiology, and so forth. In this process, the reader re-creates the text based on his/her personal parameters. However, the text resists the reader, having been thought of by another person, whose axiological, temporal and contextual horizons may be different. Which is the possibility of convergence or disagreement between author and reader? The answers to this problematisation showed that the reading-writing process is made up of an ethical perspective with a dialogical base: the presence of the other occurs as alterity and, in the light of this presence, it leads to the necessity of making choices, interventions and of considering options which could destroy, carnivalise, praise, or idealize this other. The centrality of language in the establishment of the social being showed that the dialogical discourse ethics is a key concept for understanding reading and writing.