The Genre of Trolls - Doria

orientation of the speaker to the response of the listener; this anticipated
answer shapes the utterance. Addressivity requires an active understanding
on the part of the listener, who must absorb the utterance into his own
conceptual system, and thereby construct new interrelationships, consonances
and dissonances with the utterance (Bakhtin 1986a: 280–282). In
chapter 7 I will be using dialogue chiefly in this sense.
Within folkloristic research yet other meanings have accrued to dialogue.
Lotte Tarkka has spoken of a dialogue between genres (Tarkka 1994: 265,
267–291, 295), and of dialogue on the thematic level, e.g. a symbolic dialogue
between humans and supernatural creatures in ritual (Tarkka 1994:
251, 260–261, 266–272, 274–287, 295). In dialogical anthropology, the word
has been applied to the interaction between interviewer and interviewee as
well (Vasenkari 1999; Vasenkari & Pekkala 2000). More generally, dialogue
has been applied to almost any form of linguistic exchange, but one peculiar
characteristic of dialogue in comparison with other similar terms might
be worth mentioning. Unlike dialectic, for example, dialogue does not imply
the fusion of thesis and antithesis in a synthesis; dialogue has no end point,
no real resolution. It continues beyond the boundaries of any particular exchange
(Morson & Emerson 1990: 49–50).
Discourse is a much-used term in contemporary cultural research, and
this dissertation is no exception; the nuances of my own usage of the word
mainly derive from Michel Foucault’s, Norman Fairclough’s and Mikhail
Bakhtin’s definitions of it. Foucault employs it in three senses: firstly, it
represents the general domain of all statements (discourse without an article
in English); secondly, it refers to an individualizable group of statements (a
discourse); and thirdly, it signifies a regulated practice accounting for a certain
number of statements (Foucault 1999: 106). I will be using the word in
all these senses, though chiefly in the first and second ones. Fairclough’s
conception of discourse is related to Foucault’s; for Fairclough, a discourse
is a specific way of constructing a subject matter or area of knowledge
(Fairclough 1992: 128), while discourse is language use as a form of social
practice (Fairclough 1992: 63).
Bakhtin, or rather his translator, deploys discourse somewhat differently;
sometimes it refers to a voice, as in double-voiced discourse, a designation
that will be utilized in chapter 6, and sometimes it denotes a method of
using words presuming authority, a usage that is due to the meaning of the
original Russian word slovo (Mills 2002: 7–8). Discourse may also be de-
12
Introduction