Heteroglossia, a new definition?

In Daniel’s hypertext essay about the corporate prison system I think the heteroglossia comes from the different interviews in the piece. There is an extreme difference in the way men and women understand what is going on at any given moment and I’m sure that takes on a special look in the prison system. When interviewing, the language between men and women is different in their descriptions of what happened or is happening. However, some of these interviews show the difference between one specific incident and a habitual issue.

I think also the different ways she expresses her concern over the women’s prison system, i.e. text, pictures, audio clips, adds to the idea of heteroglossia. Until recently, I had assumed heteroglossia to mean different voices of the same narrator, author or producer of the work within text. But I do think there is something to be said that heterglossia could mean different forms of information or text within a piece to give it many different voices that the producer of the work wanted the audience to hear.

In this case, reading the text, seeing the pictures and listening to the voices forces the audience to understand what the piece is about in many different mediums, all related to the same work. Could that be considered a use or definition of heteroglossia or will it be defined strictly to its use in narrator’s voice? The definition our quiz used was, “This term was originally used by a Russian formalist and poststructural critic to describe the plurality of voices in a literary work, although its usage has since expanded to the rhetorical analysis of other discussions. While it is not the same things as ‘multivocality,’ it does share some common features in that its presence in a text (or in a discourse) necessarily relies on the fact that new viewpoints are formed in language due to the tension between dominant and less dominant voices.”

Using that definition, I raise the question again; can heteroglossia include different mediums within the same work? This piece has most of those requirements the definition offers, having dominant and less dominant voices and it relies on new viewpoints to be heard and understood. I’m not sure of an answer to this but I think my personal opinion is yes, there is something to be said for heteroglossia being one work with different mediums within it and I think that Daniel’s work is a good example of that.