This article proposes a new methodology for analysing song, underpinned by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism It builds upon the recent current of scholarship which challenges Bakhtin’s hierarchical view of the novel as the dialogic literary mode par excellence and presents the theories of dialogism and heteroglossia as apt for the analysis of lyric poetry In the article, this Bakhtinian theoretical framework is applied to a little-known song setting of Catulle Mendes’s ‘Chanson’, composed by Augusta Holmes, and published in issue six of Mallarme’s 1874 fashion magazine La Derniere Mode The objective of the article is twofold: on the one hand it seeks to situate this collaborative endeavour within a historically and culturally wide-ranging intertextual network and, on the other, it aims to demonstrate that using Bakhtinian theory can be of great value in word and music studies, enhancing our understanding of the processes by which songs are created, performed and received

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Dialogism and Song: Intertextuality, Heteroglossia and Collaboration in Augusta Holmès’s Setting of Catulle Mendès’s “Chanson”

Bakhtin’s critique of poetry as a monologic speech genre has not fared well over the last forty years.1 Most commentators have found that it contradicts Bakhtin’s own ideas about the dialogic nature of discourse, language, or the utterance. The general contention is that if discourse, language, or the utterance contains degrees and kinds of otherness (that is, if they are intrinsically dialogical), then poetry is dialogical, inasmuch as it can be analyzed as discourse, language, or utterance. Additionally, some critics have pointed to Bakhtin’s dialogic reading of Pushkin’s Romantic lyric “Parting” as evidence of a contradiction between Bakhtin’s theory and practice, while other commentators have proffered dialogic analyses of poetry as a reconsideration of Bakhtin’s perspective on poetry. Even more telling are the recent essays in Jacob Blevins’ anthology Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre, which ignore Bakhtin’s monologic assessment of poetry. Blevins himself provides a rationale for this omission: “Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism is an important, thoughtful understanding of the dynamic nature of language, both inside and outside of literary discourse, but Bakhtin simply miscalculated the dialogic potential of poetry” (16).2

Dialogism and Monologism in “Song of Myself”

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Dialogism and Monologism in “Song of Myself”