Public medium, private talk: Gossip about a TV show as ‘quotidian hermeneutics’

Abstract

This article examines how the interpenetration of the public and the private spheres is accomplished in discourse. My analysis of the interactions among family and friends that were prompted by the television program Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? shows how different voices from the public sphere are recycled and interpreted in private talk. I identify such conversations about the television show as gossip or a type of talk that Bakhtin (1975: 151) describes as ‘zhytejskaya germenevtika’, a term which was previously translated as ‘living hermeneutics’ (Bakhtin 1981: 338), but which I suggest is more accurately translated as ‘quotidian hermeneutics’ because it better captures Bakhtin's concept of the everyday nature of meaning-making in discourse.