MIKHAIL BAKHTIN, LANGSTON HUGHES AND THE POETIC UTTERANCE

A critical pragmatics finds good grounding in Bakhtin and Voloshinov’s theory of the Utterance in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929). In this essay I explore and extend the notion of ‘reaccenting’ with that of ‘retexting’ and call attention to the role of textualities in the performance and deformance of written language. Critical pragmatic moves beyond stylistics and proposes a more critical linguistic approach to literary texts. I use critical pragmatics informed by Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance to read Langston Hughes’s dialogic lyrics in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and poetic retexting as a literate and critical practice.