Place, Voice, Space: Mikhail Bakhtin's Dialogical Landscape

1 September 1990

journal article
Published by SAGE Publications in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Vol. 8 (3) , 255-274
https://doi.org/10.1068/d080255

Abstract

Geographers have produced a host of different interpretations of the landscape. In this essay I aim to participate in such an endeavour by linking Mikhail Bakhtin's work to geographical inquiry. Concepts such as dialogism, heteroglossia, the chronotope, and polyphony are only a sample of his valuable contributions to the theory of knowledge, alongside the ‘carnival’ sense of the world that conveys a pathos of shift and change, of death and renewal. ‘Carnival’ sums up the rituals and diverse festivities that reflect popular culture. Together these notions lead to a better understanding of otherness and alterity. This understanding provides the basis for a conceptual landscape that indicates the moment and situation (time-space) of a dialogue whose outcome is never a neutral exchange. Landscape thus becomes not only ‘graphically visible’ in space but also ‘narratively visible’ in time through dialogue.

Keywords

This publication has 16 references indexed in Scilit:

GEOGRAPHY and POST‐MODERNISM: LlNKING HUMANISM and DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes, 1989
(Re)Reading the Landscape
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1988
The Postmodern Challenge: Reconstructing Human Geography
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1988
The Emergence of Social Space
Published by Springer Nature ,1988
Introduction: Partial Truths
Published by University of California Press ,1986
The institutionalization of regions: a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of regions and the constitution of regional identity
Fennia – International Journal of Geography, 1986
Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1985
On Ethnographic Authority
Representations, 1983
In what sense a regional problem?
Regional Studies, 1979
Towards a theory of communicative competence
Inquiry, 1970