The Dialogic Tension between Levels of Discourses

摘要

This paper endeavors to demonstrate the similarity between Chapter 42 of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge" through a textual analysis based on the “dialogue" theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian critic. The scrutiny reveals how different points of view interact with one another to give rise to deeper levels of meaning.