Studies within dialogic criticism, following Bakhtin, have often argued that the novel genre is the most dialogic of the genres. This study challenges that claim by indicating ways in which poetry is dialogic drawing mainly on evidence from Gikuyu and Kiswahili verse genres. Chapter One explores the nature of dialogue in language and in literature suggesting that the appropriation of dialogue by the novel fails to account for the presence of dialogic relations in verse genres. An alternative approach is proposed in which the dialogic nature of utterances is more genre universal than genre specific. Verse genres are shown to have the capacity of interact with each other and to utilize different registers and direct and reported speech.;The claim that verse genres can be intensely dialogic is continued in Chapter Two by examining contestation in poems in Kiswahili that are structurally non-dialogue and those that are structured as dialogues. Both types are shown to have dialogic relations. Chapter Three examines performance as a dialogic relation geared as it is towards addressivity, social challenge among performers and the attainment of certain local and global goals during the interaction. A gungu dialogue poem is discussed in detail as an illustration.;Chapter Four discusses a Gikuyu genre which utilizes to a very significant degree the social convention of greetings in its constitution. The genre is also structurally modelled on the riddle because it is performed by at least two poets who compose cooperatively yet competitively as they comment on each other's compositions. It is claimed that the gicaandi/ genre is polyphonous and one that resists generic containment. In the final analysis, the East African poetic genres studied emerge as plurilogic.
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