Heterodiscourse as a method of historical analysis of romance

Abstract

The concept of “heterodiscourse” (raznorétchie), such as developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, constitutes a powerful and yet still rarely used methodological tool for historians, in particular for the study of literary sources. Understanding it, at first, as the incorporation of the speech of others in the novel, this text intends to elaborate this formulation more deeply. This will be done through dialogue with other traditional concepts of the Bakhtinian arsenal, such as “dialogism” and “polyphony”, but not only. Based on some episodes of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605-1615), my intention is to elaborate and demonstrate, from the concept of heterodiscourse, analysis tools that could be useful to historians. At first, I formulate the idea of “degree of objectification of language”, seeking to address the complex issue of the authenticity of object representation through language. In a second, more important moment, I propose the systematization of heterodiscourse at progressive levels of different depths – what I called “heterodiscursive levels” – aiming to embrace the multiple layers of social voices present in a novel and better capture the historical reality through which these are circumscribed.