Bakhtiniana. A Journal of Discourse Studies

[…] for we have in mind discourse, that is, language in its concrete living totality, and not language as the specific object of linguistics, something arrived at through a completely legitimate and necessary abstraction from various aspects of the concrete life of the word. (…) [the analyses that follow] (…) belong rather to metalinguistics, if we understand by that term the study of those aspects in the life of the word, not yet shaped into separate and specific disciplines, that exceed — and completely legitimately — the boundaries of linguistics.

Mikhail Bakhtin.¹

Here is another issue of Bakhtiniana, a quality journal that has been publishing studies in the area of discourse for 13 years. Discourse – we all know, is a polysemic term that demands a definition to be understood in relation to the theoretical background of which it is part. Therefore, in the journal whose title pays tribute to a group of scholars who innovated language studies in a remarkable and original way, it is worth reviewing the meaning of discourse according to the Dialogic Discourse Analysis - DDA, a theoretical and methodological perspective of research inspired in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Circle.

Discourse is one of the basic concepts developed by the Circle, which was composed of Mikhail Bakhtin, Valentin N. Vološinov and Pavel N. Medvedev, among others. Those scholars met in the 1920s-1930s to discuss themes such as language, in different modalities - literature, philosophy, religion, culture-, ideological creation, in short, in a difficult moment when survival itself was at risk. And even though an Editorial is not the most appropriate space to go deeper into the notion, let us highlight some aspects of it. The concept of discourse, which was innovative at that time, referred to “language in its concrete living totality.” Yet, not overlooking the linguistic features of the utterance, Mikhail Bakhtin proposes a “study of those aspects in the life of the word, not yet shaped into separate and specific disciplines, that exceed — and completely legitimately — the boundaries of linguistics.” The extralinguistic features that produce dialogic relations, become the “positions of various subjects” (BAKHTIN, 1984, p.183),² as the author clearly explains in the epigraph to this text. In 1926, Vološinov was also dealing with the concepts of concrete utterance and speech communication which exert great power over the concept of discourse, too. As the author himself quotes: “the situation enters into the utterance as an essential constitutive part of the structure of its import.” (VOLOŠINOV, 1976, p.100).³ And Bakhtin / Medvedev do the same in the following excerpt, from 1928, in which they highlight the axiological aspect of discourse: “Social evaluation is the common denominator of the content and form of every element of the construction [of an utterance] (BAKHTIN; MEDVEDEV, 1978, p.140).”⁴ To round it up, DDA focuses its studies on the parole (or the language) in its concrete and living integrity, of which meaning is constituted by dialogic relationships (that are axiological).

This does not mean that Bakhtiniana restricts the publication of its articles to this theoretical-methodological spectrum only, for it accepts studies from various discursive perspectives. In our pages, articles that seek the meaning of discourse in a variety of perspectives are common, based on theories from a myriad of scholars, such as Michel Foucault, Michel Pêcheux, Norman Fairclough, Oswald Ducrot, Jean-Claude Ascombre, Yuri Lotman, Algirdas J. Greimas, Jacques Fontanille, Dominique Maingueneau, among many others. When we write on the frontpage of our journal that its “mission isto promote and to publicize research on discourse, mainly on dialogic studies,” we are aware that discursive studies encompass a large number of theories, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory. Our objective, then, broadly stated, is restricted to the publication of quality articles whose scope is “discourse,” understood according to each epistemology that takes it as an object.

This is exactly what happens in this third issue of 2021, in which we can have a glimpse of discourse analysis from several theoretical-methodological perspectives. The first article, from Mailson Fernandes Cabral de Souza from the Universidade Católica de Pernambuco (UNICAP), Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, entitled Maria Emilia Amarante Torres Lima: A Rescue of the Memory of the Discourse Analysis in Brazil reclaims and values the intellectual trajectory of Maria Emília Amarante Torres Lima, an important Brazilian researcher, supervised by Michel Pêcheux between the late 1960s and 1980s, when she spent a long period in Paris. The text elaborates the researcher's trajectory in a relatively recent, but partially forgotten past, valuing the work of a pioneer in discourse studies in Brazil, linked initially to Social Psychology. With the theoretical-methodological contribution of the studies developed by Jeanne Marie Gagnebin on memory and narration, the text recalls the works of Amarante Torres Lima, not only by recovering her memory within the history of Brazilian discourse analysis studies, but also by dissociating the Pecheutian analysis in Brazil from a single historical narrative most known and remembered among us, Brazilians. In addition, at a time of strong authoritarian inflection in the country, it is essential to return to contact with Torres Lima's analysis of the functioning of Getúlio Vargas's May 1st speeches.

The second article of this issue takes the Bakhtinian perspective as its theoretical-methodological foundation. Written by Mohammadreza Hassanzadeh Javanian, from the Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, and Farzan Rahmani, from the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Department of English, Tehran, Iran, the article is entitled Killing Joke: A Study of the Carnivalesque Discourse in Todd Phillip's Joker. It discusses divers carnivalesque/carnivalization elements accounted for in the movie Joker (2019), showing how the well-known character is presented under an aura marked by political awareness. The Joker becomes the protagonist of an attack against the dominant and official culture of the Gotham universe, making a utopian condition of freedom out of anarchy.

From the analysis of the film, we move on to the analysis of an important current rap composer in Brazil, in the article entitled A Bluesman's Beards: A Sign of Black Resistance in Bahian Rap, written by Camilla Ramos dos Santos, Marlúcia Mendes da Rocha, and Isaias Francisco de Carvalho, all from the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz (UESC), Ilhéus, Bahia, Brazil. It is an important text for those who want to know more about Brazilian rap and hip hop and its role as an ideological sign in the construction of a black conscience in Brazil. Songs from Baco Exu's second album, Bluesman, are analyzed, highlighting the critique of the conditions of socioeconomic inequality and racism imposed on Afro-descendants. The songs launch a cry of resistance to necropolitics in the name of values of ethics and poetry in the political making. Based on Bakhtinian concepts and social theories that lead us to better understand the structural racism that dominates our country, the text highlights the role of the rapper, showing how his work constitutes one of the steps towards “the construction of an inclusive and anti-racist counterculture.”

The following article is The Discourse Genre and the Dispute Over The Forms of (Re)Construction of Social Practices, written by Vanessa Arlésia de Souza Ferretti, from the Universidade Estadual de Mato Grosso do Sul (UEMS), Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. It has as theoretical scope the Critical Discourse Analysis and the Critical Genre Analysis. Based on these theoretical lenses, the researcher analyzes a socio-educational group session for men who are perpetrators of violence against women and points to essential openings in the political struggle for social change.

From another theoretical-methodological point of view, Discourse Analysis originating in France, Gláucia Muniz Proença Lara, from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, writes Brazilians in Europe: Three Successful Stories in the Light of Discourse Analysis. By analyzing life narratives of three Brazilian migrants in Europe, the article seeks to promote an understanding of the reasons that led them to the migratory undertaking and why that might have been perceived as successful attempts.

The following article addresses the biblical religious discourse of Paul's epistle to the Romans. With the text entitled The Diatribe in Meaning Making of Paul’s Letter to Romans, Ilderlândio Assis de Andrade Nascimento, from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Seridó, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, puts that biblical discourse in dialogue with the Bakhtinian perspective of language, showing the occurrence of the diatribe materialized in the configurating linguistic-enunciative elements of the direct speech rhetoric on the text. It reveals not only the internal dialogicity of the letter, but also the veiled dialogue contained in it, and the meeting of voices and discourses that materialize the interlocutors’ points of view, as well.

The last article contemplates poetic discourse. Vadim Andreev from Smolensk State University, Smolensk, Russian Federation, analyzes the evolution of space and movement categorizations in the poetry of the American HW Longfellow, in the article Style Evolution: Space and Movement in Longfellow’s Lyrical Poems. The text follows the structural organization of Longfellow’s poems throughout his career, relating it to his poetic world.

The issue is completed by a review and an interview, both of which are far-reaching in language studies. Juliana Harumi Chinatti, from the Universidade de Brasília (UnB), Brasília, Brazil, reviews Racismo Estrutural [Structural Racism], a book from Sílvio Almeida's, which is essential for any research in the human sciences that intends to understand the constitution of racism in its different dimensions, its relations with power and ideology. And Jean Carlos Gonçalves, from the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), Curitiba, Brazil, takes us to a better understanding of Dick McCaw in the interview Bakhtin, Theatrical Discourse and Aesthetic Education: An Interview with Dick McCaw. Dick McCaw is a professor at the Department of Drama, Theater and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK, and a great connoisseur of Bakhtin's work in the realm of theater.

As readers can see, this is a varied issue both from a theoretical point of view and in terms of the ample variety of discourses analyzed and the multiple number of institutions and authors. This is so for this issue that brings together nine Brazilian researchers from seven different Brazilian universities (UNICAP-PE, UESC-BA, UEMS-MS, UFRN-RN, UFMG-MG, UnB-DF, UFPR-PR) and three researchers from foreign universities (Freie Universität Berlin/Germany, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures/Tehran/Iran, Smolensk State University/Russian Federation). We invite everyone – readers, authors, and collaborators – to relish this issue and include this set of articles in their research, giving Bakhtiniana the opportunity to actively participate in Brazilian and international cultural and academic life as it has always been. The submissions, as well as their rigorous selection, carried out by competent and collaborative reviewers of the editorial board and ad hoc, allowed the journal to reach this excellent result: Bakhtiniana keeps firm in the commitment to always create dialogical possibilities for research linked to discursive studies of language.

Our gratitude, once again, goes to the constant and important support, assistance, and recognition of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), São Paulo, Brazil, which, through the Plano de Incentivo à Pesquisa (PIPEq)/Publicação de Periódicos (PubPer-PUCSP) [Research Incentive Plan (PIPEq)/Publication of Periodicals (PubPer-PUCSP) – 2021], Solicitação [Request] 18.937, made this issue possible and, thus, the continuity of Bakhtiniana. Journal of Discourse Studies. On the other hand, we believe we speak for the whole academic and scientific community when we lament the withdrawal of support from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior [Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel] (CAPES) and Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico[National Council for Scientific and Technological Development] (CNPq) to Brazilian journals of excellence, which show the disregard for science that singles out the current government.

• Translated by Paulo Rogério Stella - [e-mail]; htts://orcid.org/0000-0003-4494-631
• 1
  BAKHTIN, M. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. 8th printing. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp.180-181. [1963]
• 2
  For reference, see footnote 1.
• 3
  BAKHTIN, M. VOLOŠINOV, V. Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art. Concerning Sociological Poetics. In: Freudianism: A Marxist Critique. Transl. by Irwin R. Titunik, New York: Academic Press, 1976 [1929].
• 4
  BAKHTIN, M. /MEDVEDEV, P. N. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1928].

REFERÊNCIAS

• BAKHTIN, M. Problemas da poética de Dostoiévski 4. ed. revista e ampliada. Tradução, notas e prefácio de Paulo Bezerra. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2008.
• MEDVIEDEV, P. O método formal nos estudos literários Introdução crítica a uma poética sociológica. Tradução e notas de Sheila Grillo e Ekaterina Vólkova Américo. Apresentação de Beth Brait. Prefácio de Sheila Vieira de Camargo Grillo. São Paulo: Contexto, 2012.
• VOLÓCHINOV, V. A palavra na vida e a palavra na poesia: para uma poética sociológica. In: VOLOCHINOV, V. N. (Círculo de Bakhtin). A palavra na vida e a palavra na poesia Ensaios, artigos, resenhas e poemas. Organização, tradução, ensaio introdutório e notas de Sheila Grillo e Ekaterina Vólkova Américo, 2019, p.109-146.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  17 Sept 2021
• Date of issue
  July/Sept. 2021