Chapter 13

The beginning of this chapter, "Dialogic Aspects of Communication", was hard to understand. The chapter said that words come from dialogue. Words get their meanings from the way people use them in day-to-day language. Words do not only have a specific meaning in the present, but they are also informing about the meaning of something in the past. These ideas from Bakhtin also stress the importance of responsive understanding.  Michael Holquist defines responsive understanding as "a fundamental force that participates in the formulation of discourse". He also describes this discourse as an active understanding which is resistance or support to the discourse. Mikhail Bakhtin was a theorist of communication from Russia. He studied dialogism, a theory of language. Dialogism focuses on "taking dialogue as its main metaphor for the communication process." He is basically saying that to have communication, two people must partake in a dialogue. A monologue is only one person speaking to themselves and that is not how you are supposed to communicate with people. When we speak with other people, we must remember what was said in the conversation and we must think about what will be said. Intertextuality is another one of Bakhtin's theories. Intertextuality simply means that texts that are being produced at any moment in time are related to texts that have already been produced before. In many instances, people are not aware that are are influenced by previously produced texts such as books, television, songs, movies, etc. Usually there is a purpose as to why we create dialogues with other people. These dialogues have to do with something that is influenced by something else. In our ad, we have an intertextual example of a parody. The man makes eating the freeze pops with the glass comparable to smoking cigarettes. They are both ridiculous concepts and hazardous actions. There is not really a dialogue in our ad because there is only one man speaking to his consumers promoting his product. It is a monologue, rather than a dialogue, because there is only one person talking. There is not a narrative either, because he is promoting a product instead of telling a story to someone else.