Polyphony (literature)
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In literature, polyphony is a feature of narrative, which includes a diversity of points of view and voices. The concept was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, based on the musical concept polyphony. Bakhtin claimed that polyphony and heteroglossia are the defining features of the novel as a literary genre.
For Bakhtin the primary example of polyphony was Dostoevsky's prose. Bakhtin argued that Dostoyevsky, unlike previous novelists, does not appear to aim for a 'single vision' and goes beyond simply describing situations from various angles. Dostoevsky engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas where conflicting views and characters are left to develop unevenly into unbearable crescendo (The Brothers Karamazov).
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Modernism and contemporary examples
- Virginia Woolf — Mrs Dalloway
- James Joyce — Ulysses
- Melvin Burgess — Junk, Doing It
- Alexander Prokhanov — 600 Years after the Battle
- Irvine Welsh — Trainspotting
- Malorie Blackman — Noughts & Crosses
- Derek Walcott — Omeros
- Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl (series)
- Paulo Coelho — The Witch of Portobello
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — Cancer Ward, The First Circle The Red Wheel series
- E.M. Forster - A Passage to India
- Tad Williams - The Dragonbone Chair
- Herman Wouk - The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Hope, The Glory
- Roberto Bolaño — The Savage Detectives
- Paul Auster — Sunset Park
- Fred D'Aguiar — The Longest Memory
- Alice Munro — Fiction (2007 / 2009)
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See also
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References
- Mikhail Bakhtin — Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art: Polyphony and Unfinalizability
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