. In particular, the controversial Russian theorist Mikhail Bahktin (1895–1975) argued that all language use encompasses contested meanings. Bahktin's studies of the form of the novel, particularly Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics (1929; revised 1963 and translated into English in 1983) and Rabelais and His World (1945; revised 1965 and translated 1968), introduced a method of discourse analysis in which words themselves were considered as sites of multiple meanings, rather than as stable representations of other thoughts or objects.5 Bahktin described narrative structures as the result of “heteroglossia,” or multiple languages interacting with each other to produce communication and diverse meanings rather than singular or constrained meanings.