Media by Bakhtin/Bakhtin Mediated

In The Dynamics of Genre, Dallas Liddle returns us to periodical texts and readers' dynamic interaction with them by way of M. M. Bakhtin, whose concept of a Galilean, "decentered and complexly interacting universe of discourse" (7) so resonantly illuminates Victorian periodicals en masse. I applaud Liddle's focus on two fundamental questions: "what we are reading, exactly, when we read a periodical text" and "how scholars can connect evidence from the periodical press rigorously enough to the ambitious interpretive claims we so often try to make about" literature, publishing, and the impact of both on culture (3). A high point of his book is its compelling chapter on Trollope, which contributes importantly to both fiction and journalism studies by showing how frequently and resourcefully Trollope fictionalized while also theorizing journalism. This last derives from Trollope's attention to how journalism and readers actually intersected in readers' encounter with simultaneous, competing journalistic pieces vying for allegiance. Liddle's final chapter is a model of situating periodical studies in relation to alternative theoretical models and methods; the next time I teach a graduate seminar on Victorian literature and periodicals, I will be assigning "The Scholar's Tale" as well as the Prologue from The Dynamics of Genre.

Liddle's attention to genre makes me doubly aware of the one within which I write; and a scholarly forum devoted to a recent work demands that I not merely applaud its achievement but also pose new questions about what it says and how its insights can be applied to future scholarship and teaching. Two quotes prompt questions in my mind about Bakhtin's reliability as a framework for periodicals study and Dallas Liddle's application of his theory. The first is an epigraph from Bakhtin at the head of "The Poet's Tale" (Chap. 1): "Throughout the entire development of the novel, its intimate interaction (both peaceful and hostile) with living rhetorical genres (journalistic, moral, philosophical and others) has never ceased; this interaction was perhaps no less intense than was the novel's interaction with the artistic genres (epic, dramatic, lyric)" (Liddle 13). The second concerns Liddle's contention that Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism cannot be applied to the miscellaneous forms that jostle against each other within a periodical but only to the dialogic novel, since as Bakhtin says, "journalistic and other 'extra-artistic' texts," unlike the novel, are always "'oriented toward the 'already uttered,' the 'already known,' the 'common opinion' and so forth'" (152). To think dialectically—if not dialogically—at the outset, perhaps I am so tied to the notion of the periodical itself as a profoundly dialogic form that I am resistant to the paradigm that Liddle places before me instead. But I am uneasy about the binarism of Bakhtin's distinction between types of genres (and their application in this book), a binarism that seems fundamentally at odds with the notion of dynamic, interactive, changing discourse modes that are so important an insight and hallmark of Bakhtin's work.

In part my unease results from a further question about what unit we should focus on as a periodical text. I think Dallas Liddle is right to argue that when readers, past or present, are engaged with an article as such, or a poem as such, or a book review as such when these are read in periodicals, readers indeed rely on their understanding of specific genres to read them. But these genres cannot be accessed unilaterally or one-off as they can be when we read a book of essays, a book of poems, a freestanding novel, or a PDF from a single hit in an electronic database. In a print periodical we reach each genre by going past other, competing genres. A crucial defining marker of a periodical article, therefore, is contiguity with other competing forms. Each subgenre within a periodical is thus (to craft a term parallel to Bakhtin's) "periodicalized."

If, as Liddle insists, we need to return to Richard Altick's focus on how readers are dynamically situated in relation to what they read in periodicals and...