Abstract

The principal idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract 'formal approach and an equally abstract ideological approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenonsocial throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning. -M. M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel (259)