Dialogism and Polyphony of Consciousnesses: A...

Dialogism and Polyphony of Consciousnesses: A Bakhtinian Reading of Anita Desai's In Custody

Author Name : Dr. Rajni Kant Goswami

ABSTRACT

Bakhtin’s major contribution to the field of Critical studies is his key concepts which initially appeared in his seminal work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art but later expanded in his celebrated Essay “Discourse in the Novel”. His deliberations on Dialogism and Polyphony of voices are the avant-garde ideas which Bakhtin applied to explore the uniqueness and ingenuity in Dostoevsky’s novels. The present research article is an attempt to probe Anita Desai’s novel In Custody using Bakhtinian concepts of Polyphony and Dialogism as tools of investigation.

Keywords- Dialogism, institutionalized censorship, defamiliarisation, polyphony, monologism, language politics, class dynamics