Dialogic Poetics: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Rococo and Other Poems (2010)

Abstract

In South Asia, the aftermaths of colonialism and civil wars generate fragmented socio-cultural and political discourse that is the key feature of postmodernism. This paper investigates the poetry collection Rococo and Other Poems (2010) in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of Dialogism. It aims at examining the text as a product of the context in which it is written as Bakhtin places texts within history and society which are themselves seen as texts that a writer goes through and within which he places himself by rewriting them. Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia exhibits the interplay among social dialects, professional jargons, and language of socio-political purposes that provides multiplicity of meaning in a text. This heteroglossic paradigm dismantles the hostility for ‘theory’ that may seem ‘a case of spreading habit’ to some critics while interpreting a text. The findings inspect how Bakhtin’s theory assists to decode the text of Rococo and Other Poems (2010) as a creation of postmodernism and postcolonialism which add to the multiple layers of meaning through dialogic discourse by not taking the readers too far from the objects of this research. Since the selected text is a translated work so it also celebrates the consideration for translated works. The textual analysis of the primary text with secondary sources (interviews, internet sources, personal views, biography, articles and author’s other works) is conducted to explore how colonialism and civil wars in South Asia transform modern subjects into socio-politically fragmented identities who constitute their multilayered context in Rococo and Other Poems (2010).