Dear Mikhail

Main Idea:

Dialogic = intertextuality, ongoing dialogue, context, conversations are always conversing with conversations that came before them.

Dear Mikhail,

What I first noticed about your excerpts in my rhetoric book is your first name. Now, that may be strange to you, but I'll explain why. I have a rather unhealthy obsession with the television program Lost. Believe it or not, one of the tertiary characters in the series has your first name. And he's Russian! And he lives underground! Ha. Given this, it is no surprise that when I began reading these excerpts I paid less attention to what you were saying than I did trying to figure out how your philosophy folded into the Lost mythos. Because, you see, in drama studies all roads lead to Thebes, but in Sarah Morgan studies, all roads lead to Lost. So, there you have my academic framework for grappling with your language studies.

Ideology seems like a good place to start. You tell me that all language, all signs, in fact, are a reflection and/or refraction of an ideology. I get that: language is communicative, communication occurs in society, society's framework lies in ideology and those ideologies in society establish culture. Basically, you think that language is always subject to ideological boundaries (Sidebar: I also have a feeling that by "ideology" you sometimes mean "government"-- as in restrictive Russian government--so your very communication, this very writing that I'm reading right now, is subjected to the cultural and political power of government. Yes? Maybe?). So, ideological boundaries...you also explain that individual consciousness (IC) can only be found through ideology. Wow, I guess that's kind of true; we can't be self aware if that awareness occurs in a vacuum, but I wonder if the IC can break out of ideological restraints? Can it only leave one ideology for another, perhaps? There is no new ground only new navigation? That is disheartening, but in a way very true.

So how does this apply to Lost? Well, any avid fan (we're all avid fans, you have to be, really, to understand the show) can tell you that each episode, indeed each scene is in a larger conversation with the series as a whole. Meaning can only be made by considering the larger structure of the Lost-universe. I guess it kind of fits then, but I'm not sure that's exactly what the creators were going for when they named the Russian dude Mikhail, but that's what I'm taking from it; that's my utterance on that.

You also said some cool stuff about utterance, sentences, novels, and linguistics. I'm going to make a chart on poster board to sort it all out. I hope you'll like it. Let me know.

-S.