Voice, sense and dialogue on Bakhtin

Abstract

The article emphasizes the oral quality of the main Bakhtinian concepts related to dialogue, such as voice, hearing, listener, tone, tonality, intonation, accent and others. Bakhtin, unlike other theoreticians, doesn’t divide drastically the oral from the written culture. Instead, he refers the idea of all communication phenomenon to the idea of the ethical act, and, in consequence, literature results in an act with acoustic quality as the base of dialogue, and is metaphorically extended from oral to written texts. Voice has personalist and answerable connotations.