I turned in a paper for class yesterday, which concerns Russian literary theorist Michael Bakhtin and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and I figured: "What the heck? I may as well post it here for anyone who might be interested in it. . ."
Literary and Cultural Interpretation
Prof. Larry Shillock
Assignment 1
Student: Alex MacDonald
A Bakhtinian Understanding of Robert Louis Stevenson's: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Thesis statement: Russian literary theorist Michael Bakhtin theorizes that all speech acts, which he calls "utterances", anticipate a response on the part of an active listener.
Three main points to follow: 1) Stevenson's novella, as a whole, is a Bakhtinian utterance of the complex, secondary speech genre; 2) Stevenson's novella, as a whole, elicits a powerful Bakhtinian response from an active Bakhtinian listener; 3) Stevenson's use of Dr. Lanyon's letter, which is of the simple, primary speech genre, ends the narrator's Bakhtinian utterance and becomes caught-up into "actual reality" by being incorporated into the utterance that is the novella—the epitome, according to Bakhtin, of the living, complex, sociologically oriented, secondary speech genre that is: the novel (or, in Stevenson's case: the novella).
Contrary to other linguists, who think of language as a system of signs, Bakhtin emphasizes the sociological nature of language. Theorizing that the spoken word is primary, Bakhtin denies neutrality to language and exposes all "speech acts" as being heavy-laden with sociological presuppositions, because all speakers are also active listeners who have been influenced by—and who are responding to—innumerable, prior, sociological utterances.
Bakhtin theorizes that these sociologically influenced, non-neutral speech acts always anticipate a response from an active listener. As for Bakhtin's concept of the utterance, Bakhtin tells us "The utterance is not a conventional unit [i.e., an abstract, sign-system, unit of speech], but a real unit, clearly delimited by the change of speaking subjects . . ." Bakhtin also tells us that, "Each separate utterance is individual . . . but each sphere [i.e., genre] in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres."
According to Bakhtin, there are two types of speech genres: the primary (i.e., the simple) and the secondary (i.e., the complex). For example, the primary speech genre consists of the simple utterances (e.g., words, phrases, and expressions) of everyday life; whereas the secondary speech genre consists of primary utterances which are shaped, according to the spheres in which they are to be used, into the more complex utterances (e.g., scientific treaties, commentaries, novels), which are necessary for complex, socially-oriented communications.
Bakhtin thinks of the novel as a unique genre, because of its living, dynamic, and sociologically oriented nature: "Studying other genres is analogous to studying dead languages, studying the novel, on the other hand, is like studying languages that are not only alive, but still young."
