Bakhtin's “rough draft”: Toward a philosophy of the act, ethics, and composition studies1

Abstract

Helen Rothschild Ewald's 1993 essay, Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies, attempts to consolidate and redirect nearly a decade's appropriation of Bakhtin's work in composition studies. Its ambition to provide an authoritative map of and a new direction to Bakhtinian composition studies has been fulfilled in both its original place of publication and in its recent republication as the culminating essay in the first collection of landmark essays on Bakhtin, rhetoric, and (Farmer). While demonstrating the widespread use of Bakhtin in the field, Ewald characterizes this work as predominantly social-constructionist and heralds a new ethical emphasis that might be drawn from his earlier work on answerability. With heavy irony she deprecates how handy (332, 337) Bakhtin's work has been to a range of social-constructionist writers but chooses not to undertake a direct refutation of their claims. Instead, she chooses to suggest some teaching practices as part of a general reorientation of composition studies that would focus on and examine our specific situational responses to ethical issues that arise when we engage in or the teaching of writing (345). Connecting with a crossdisciplinary revival of inquiry into ethical issues, Ewald's intervention could be taken to herald an important ethical turn in Bakhtinian composition studies. Ewald necessarily draws much of her account of Bakhtin's early themes of ethics and answerability, as she acknowledges, from Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Slavicists who have provided the most extensive and authoritative reading of Bakhtin to date and joined vigorously in the revival of ethical issues in literary criticism. Ewald shares not only their emphasis in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics on the superior authenticity and ethical seriousness of Bakhtin's early work but also their impatience with readers of his work who have confined their interest to his socially oriented theories of dialogue and carnival. Like Morson and Emerson, she eschews refutation of these readers but identifies herself with a more serious and worthy future line of inquiry into answerability in the ethical sense of individual accountability as