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Doug, a bit late here but I didn't get around to thanking you for your excerpt on Bakhtin which I read with quite a bit of interest and thought. Perhaps novels have over the 19th and 20th centuries become more and more monologic and less and less like novels and now poetry has the task of keeping novels alive. It appears that the real heteroglossia which keeps novels alive, vital and living images, have been torn from novels by the forces of multinational publishing that see only in novels a commodity to sell and realise a profit and the model of a novel becomes Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code and other such prescriptive realist genres. You can also perhaps see this in the way writing is today being taught in universities as an adjunct training ground for the literature industry. Anyways, the four books my book supplier in Sydney has smuggled into the country from where they lay in a warehouse in the United States have finally arrived. They are all theory books mainly concerning narrative hence the need for a smuggling operation. So back to reading... Genette _Narrative discourse_ and Chatman _Story and discourse_, my Aristotelian strategic protagonists. Chris Jones. "When narrative or symbolic, figuration obtains only the bogus violence of the represented or the signified; it expresses nothing of the violence of sensation--" Gilles Deleuze Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation_ (p. xiv) What happens when a mathematician, or rather someone whose degree is in mathematics, becomes a novelist? Fiesta Carrera _Charnel knowledge_ makes a good answer written in a language that is foreign to the literature industry. > I would argue, > however, that poetry, in the process of "novelization," confronting and > accepting the centrifugal experience of heteroglossia, has retained its > separate generic stance as poetry precisely because that generic > stance allows it particular, even subversive, insights about the nature > of language and reading which might be lost in a novel.