Mark Evan Nelson and Glynda A. Hull in their discoursive chapter on “Self –preservation through multimedia,” propose that Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of heteroglossia and addressivity inform understandings of “new and emerging speech genres,” namely digital stories.

“Heteroglossia” and “addressivity” are theories that attempt to explain “how literary texts mean” (emphasis Bakhtin’s).

Heteroglossia describes “the many-languaged-ness” of the “utterance,” which Bakhtin professed to be the “appropriate unit of linguistic and literary analysis,” as opposed to the sentence. As someone who was previously unfamiliar with Bakhtin’s theory, I found this concept  (something I suppose I’ve long and latently held to be true) exciting because the utterance, as opposed to the constructed sentence, invokes something so dynamic in terms of language, culture, and style.

Nelson and Hull emphasize the utterance as being key in identifying and shaping “speech genres.”  They take a descriptive rather than prescriptive view, noting that invention plays as much a part as convention in the shaping of language.

Addressivity, as Bakhtin defines it, is “the fundamentally ‘dialogic’ or audience-oriented nature of the utterance.” It acknowledges the utterance as having both an author and an audience, and that the utterance is as influenced and varied as the addressee; it acknowledges, too, the influence that the projection of what the author assumes of audience.

According to Nelson and Hull, context matters as well, as these change “the kinds of audiences typically implied.”  So, for example, the audience of a letter would suggest nuances in utterance that would not necessarily be appropriate or true for the audience of a speech.  Likewise, genre has implications of rhetorical structure.

The authors, after hammering out the details of Bakhtinian theory, ask not if but how heteroglossia and addressivity play a role in digital stories. This is particularly interesting because the digital story is not only a new genre (I would argue it’s more medium than genre, or, at most, a sub-genre of the memoir or creative non-fiction), but it is a combination of medium, of music, language, and image.

This combination is termed “multimodality,” a good pre-digital age example of this being the pairing of spoken language and the image (think of any number of dramatic performances). If Bakhtinian theory examines the utterance within the genre, how does it work within the medium, or rather, within the combination of mediums, particularly when those mediums combine the temporal (language) with the spatial (image)?