Dialogic discourse in John Fowles’s fiction

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the prominent literary theorists of speech genres and stylistics. He was mainly focused on the philosophy of language and the multi-voiced, multi-languaged systems as a result of the oppressive regime he was under. His literary concepts reflect the autonomy of the characters, dialogue, and multi-voiced language systems. He advocated for unfinalizability, the idea of freedom of the characters, and the diversity of the languages within a novel. According to Bakhtin, language was not only a tool for communication and should be examined with its social context. His concerns for literature and groundbreaking concepts of dialogism, polyphony, and heteroglossia are the main methodologies for this study that aims to figure out the power dynamics between utterances of opposite genders and how female dialogics can be observed in John Fowles’s A Maggot and The French Lieutenant's Woman. As a postmodern novelist, John Fowles’s novels reflect the heterogeneous style which is compatible with Bakhtinian concepts. Therefore, this study will discover the dialogic relationships and how different languages and several viewpoints reflect the centrifugal forces of the literature.