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the dominant

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[Aside: The one place that Bakhtin uses Jakobson is to bring in the idea of "the dominant" -- from "Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views" p. 82, "The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure." Quoted in a translator footnote in the Dostoevsky book on page 13.]

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