(Re-)Novelizing Poetry: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Parenthesis

Abstract

In this essay, we assume that the “novelization” of poetry envisaged by Mikhail M. Bakhtin as a general tendency to liberate poetry from its ideologically unified monophony and outlived stylization is in fact a re-novelization leading poetry back to its polyphonic origins, reinstalling it as authentic “living discourse.” And, we propose, one apt means to “express” this re-novelization is parenthesis when it is re-analyzed as a communicative practice grounding in Bakhtin’s key concepts of dialog and voice: Starting from the initial premise that all discourse is fundamentally multi-voiced and that authorship is essentially multiplex, parenthesis emerges as the closest approximation of mapping polyphony onto the linearity of verbal language in text, thus inviting its reading as an author’s own other voice. We will test this proposition on three selected English poems, Wilfred Owen’s The Letter, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126, and E. E. Cummings’ l(a, all of which include intriguing specimens of parentheses.