Blackwell Reference Online

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A unitary language is not something given [dan] but is always in essence posited [zadan] – and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same time it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystallizing into a real, although still relative, unity – the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and literary language, “correct language.” […] Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization.Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four EssaysAs a country became civilized, their [sic] narrations were methodized, and moderated to probability.Clara Reeve, The Progress of RomanceThe second epigraph, from The Progress of Romance, Clara Reeve's 1785 tract on the novel/romance distinction, intuits a link between cultural advancement and narrative order. Cultural advancement is linked to the methodical and moderating effects of probability, even as fantastic excesses are reined in to accord with this valuing of realism. The methodical is to ensure the sociologically probable as the repeatable, even as the narratively repeatable ... log in or subscribe to read full text