Author: C.L. Clines

Cites

• Mikhail Bakhtin (1)
  • IN: Achebe, Chinua (1990) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker get his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.
    FROM: Discourse in the Novel, (1935), NULL, Russia