The Pleasure of the Word: Literary Discourse and Other Discourses

Abstract

All content of Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type CC-BY 4.0 EDITORIALThe Pleasure of the Word: Literary Discourse and Other Discourses / O prazer da palavra: o discurso literário e outros discursosBut for us, who are neither knights of the faith nor supermen, it only remains, so to speak, to cheat with the language, cheat the language. This salutary cheating, this evasion, this magnificent deception that allows language to be heard outside of power, in the splendor of a permanent revolution in language, I call it, as far as I am concerned: literature. 1 Roland BarthesThe novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. 2 Mikhail Bakhtin "How are language and literature arranged on the shelves of life?" This is the initial question of the presentation of the book by Brait (2010, p.11), Literatura e outras linguagens [Literature and other languages]. And this question, with a slight alteration, is quite pertinent in this beautiful issue of Bakhtiniana (17.3): how are the discursive studies of literature and other languages arranged in this volume? We have five articles that deal with the discourse of art -literature, theater, and cinema, one article that addresses the journalistic sphere, and one more, a review, which closes the issue, that examines digital discourses. It is known and widely disseminated that the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Circle provide theoretical support not only for the study of literature, as was initially believed. This is because the release of Problemas da Poética de Dostoiévski [Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics] 3 in Brazil in 1981 clearly pointed, in the title, to literature. A little earlier, however, in 1979 in Brazil, we had already had the release of the first edition 1 In Portuguese: "Mas a nós, que não somos nem cavaleiros da fé nem super-homens, só resta, por assim dizer, trapacear com a língua, trapacear a língua. Essa trapaça salutar, essa esquiva, esse logro magnífico que permite ouvir a língua fora do poder, no esplendor de uma revolução permanente da linguagem, eu a chamo, quanto a mim: literatura." 2 BAKHTIN, M. M. Discourse in the Novel.