CONCEPT
The Word With a Sideways Glance
Bakhtin's image for utterances directed toward an addressee while
simultaneously aware of a third party — speech that glances sideways at an absent judge or imagined audience.
The word with a sideways glance is speech that is overtly directed to one listener but covertly shaped by awareness of another. A student answers the teacher's question while glancing sideways at peers whose judgment she anticipates. A writer addresses the reader while glancing sideways at critics, reviewers, and the literary tradition that will evaluate the work. The sideways glance introduces a doubling of orientation: the utterance has an official addressee and an unofficial one, and the tension
between them shapes what can be said and how it can be said. Bakhtin identified this multi-directionality as characteristic of novelistic discourse, where characters speak not only to each other but to the social world whose judgment they cannot escape. The AI-co-authored text, Bakhtin's framework reveals, is saturated with sideways glances: the author writes for the reader while responding to the machine; the machine generates text responsive to the prompt while conforming to patterns in its training data; the text itself glances sideways at the discourse about