Developmental Discourse As an Author/Hero Relationship

Abstract

Dialogism views the individual as emerging from, operating within, and transacting witha complex set of social relations in an ever-changing world. Mikhail Bakhtin, in his assessment of the Bildungsroman, provides general schematic frameworks for classifying various types of novelistic genres, and explains how some genres present a static image of the hero and the world around him, while others can account for the emergence of the hero in historical time. In this paper, some novelistic genres are applied to various theoretical models of human development, in order to identify the image of the developmental subject and his relationship to significant others. Bakhtin identifies the nature of spatio-temporal relations (chronotopic motifs) in various types of literary genres, and is persistent in pointing out the limitations of monologic discourses, as they are weak in temporal categories, and as such are incapable of accounting for the hero’s development. Chronotopic motifs are extended to theories of development for a critical examination of cultural and historical processes in our discourses on development. It is concluded that a dialogical approach can offer a novel perspective on how cultural spaces and historical times mediate developmental phenomena and the phenomenon about development.