Bakhtin's Work Research Articles

Student Writing as 'Academic Literacies': Drawing on Bakhtin to Move from Critique to Design

A body of research has recently emerged in the UK which adopts an 'academic literacies' stance towards student writing. An 'academic literacies' stance conceptualises student writing as a socially situated discourse practice which is ideologically inscribed (Jones et al., 1999; Lea & Street, 1998). Whilst powerful as an oppositional frame, that is as a critique of current conceptualisations and practices surrounding student writing, academic literacies has yet to be developed as a design frame (Kress, 1998, 2000) which can actively contribute to student writing pedagogy as both theory and practice. My aim in this paper is to work towards opening up a design space built on academic literacies critique. To do so, I draw on Bakhtin's work on dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984) and my research with a group of 'non-traditional' student-writers and their specific experiences of academic writing within a number of academic disciplines (Lillis, 2001). I map out the different levels of dialogism in Bakhtin's work and illustrate the way these are, and are not, enacted currently in student writing pedagogy. I conclude by calling for dialogue, rather than monologue or dialectic, to be at the centre of an academic literacies stance and briefly outline some design implications of a dialogic approach to student writing pedagogy.

The Democratic Chorus: Culture, Dialogue and PolyphonicPaideia

ABSTRACT Sensible dialogue is essential to any healthy democracy. Dialogue, in turn, requires some grasp of the traditions within which it occurs. However, late capitalism is characterised by the systematic corruption of cultural traditions by mechanism and atomism. While the tradition of capitalism remains, our capacity to recognise and creatively overcome it is corrupted. As an alternative to this, we require a bold vision of healthy cultural life. This paper argues that such a vision can be found in the Chorus of Classical Greek tragedy. Grounded in narrative theory and the work of Bakhtin and Bourdieu, this account of the Chorus gives an alternative to the superficiality of late modernity. It is a vision of democratic citizens doing justice to themselves and one another through narrative paideia. Greek tragedy does its thinking in a form which is vastly more politically advanced than the society which produced Greek tragedy1. Edith Hall

Flerstämmighet, skolan och samhällsuppdraget

This article is a response to the report from the national inspection of the role of reading and writing in teaching in Swedish schools carried out by the National Agency for Education in 1998. In the inspection report, ‘polyphony’, a way of thinking inspired by the work of Bakhtin, his coworkers and later his disciples, is central to an analysis of the teaching situation. In this article, the discussion about polyphony is extended with a discussion about the role of ‘dialogism’. It is argued that polyphony and dialogism play a central and significant role in the analysis and understanding of what it means to support and enrich students’ language development.

Humor, Literacy and Chicano Culture

For various and complicated reasons, race and ethnic studies in the United States have yet to explore fully the cultural work with humor undertaken by artists of color. Despite growing interest in Mikhail Bakhtin's work on carnivalesque humor, and despite considerable attention devoted to "trickster" figures, the study of multicultural texts has produced readings that invite, yet frequently do not pursue, a sustained treatment of humor and its significance. 1 Given their struggle to win legitimacy for their burgeoning fields, it is understandable that some race and ethnic studies scholars would have second thoughts about committing themselves to terrain that might in itself be used by detractors to declare the frivolity and superficiality of multicultural studies. Lost in this process are the rich ways in which the art builds on a genealogy of critical humor (extending from figures like Cervantes and Erasmus) in order to present searching critiques of western rationalism. 2 I would suggest that race and ethnic studies has developed this complicated relation with humor in part because the cultural and political significance of race and ethnicity has been so intimately tied to the discourse of the law, a discourse that marshals authority and power by striving to speak from a position of transcendent rationality. 3 Understanding that race and ethnic communities have been profoundly invested in legal interpretation and its ramifications, one can see why many politically engaged artists, scholars and audiences might argue that the work of enfranchisement strongly encourages the development of cultural artifacts that adopt a weighty moral seriousness befitting the claims of legally adjudicated injury they describe. In the midst of protracted fights with the courts, a venue in which transparent motives and literal meanings dominate, humor can look like an escape valve, or perhaps a disruptive sideshow. Equating political efficacy with seriousness, a tendency has existed among many [End Page 112] teachers and scholars to read artists of color as practitioners of a realism of victimization, as advocates for causes who have too much to say to fool around with humor in its own right. 4 To the extent that race and ethnicity have been incorporated into the academy as markers for a complicated and extended history of victimization, discussions of the moral implications of this history have fostered heated arguments regarding blame, as well as frequently tendentious calculations in terms of prioritizing competing claims of injury. 5 These circumstances have sometimes made an engagement with the humor in race and ethnic culture appear inappropriate, if not offensive.

Engaging with Theories of Dialogue and Voice: Using Bakhtin as a Framework to Understand Teaching and Learning Indigenous Australian Women's Performance

In this paper I explore the Indigenous Australian women's performance classroom (hereafter ANTH2120) as a dialectic and discursive space where the location of possibility is opened for female Indigenous performers to enter into a dialogue from and between both non-Indigenous and Indigenous voices. The work of Bakhtin on dialogue serves as a useful standpoint for understanding the multiple speaking positions and texts in the ANTH2120 context. Bakhtin emphasizes performance, history, actuality and the openness of dialogue to provide an important framework for analysing multiple speaking positions and ways of making meaning through dialogue between shifting and differing subjectivities. I begin by briefly critiquing Bakhtin's “dialogic imagination” and consider the application and usefulness of concepts such as dialogism, heteroglossia and the utterance to understanding the ANTH2120 classroom as a polyphonic and discursive space. I then turn to an analysis of dialogue in the ANTH2120 classroom and primarily situate my gaze on an examination of the interactions that took place between the voices of myself as family/teacher/student and senior Yanyuwa women from the r e m o t e N o r t h e r n T e r r i t o r y A b o r i g i n a l c o m m u n i t y o f B o r r o l o o l a as family/performers/teachers. The 2000 and 2001 Yanyuwa women's performance workshops will be used as examples of the way power is constantly shifting in this dialogue to allow particular voices to speak with authority, and for others to remain silent as roles and relationships between myself and the Yanyuwa women change. Conclusions will be drawn regarding how my subject positions and white race privilege affect who speaks, who listens and on whose terms, and further, the efficacy of this pedagogical platform for opening up the location of possibility for Indigenous Australian women to play a powerful part in the construction of knowledges about women's performance traditions.

Book Review: A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love

By Alan Jacobs. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8133-6577-5 (cloth), 0-8133-6566-X (paper). Pp. ix + 186. $65.00 (cloth), $18.00 (paper). Alan Jacobs has written fine, thoughtful, and inspiring book. is part theology, part hermeneutic, part cultural study, and part ethical reflection. In it Jacobs sets out to answer the question, What would interpretation governed by the law of look like? (10). While he takes St. Augustine's discussion in On Christian Doctrine of charity as the gauge of interpretation, his argument is more deeply informed by Jesus' twofold commandment of love, so that in his estimation books must loved as one loves oneself, and the purpose of interpretation must be the generation of love (17). He brings to his task wide and careful reading of theology, philosophy, literature, literary theory, and Scripture. He writes in lucid style and illuminates both the books he considers and his own thesis. Jacobs begins with prelude in which he announces his aim of working out the principles of charitable interpretation. Citing the scene from William Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing in which Claudio publicly repudiates Hero as an example of such an interpretation, Jacobs says that the truth, justice, and expressed in the Friar's and in Beatrice's defenses of Hero--that is, in their interpretation--move Benedick to challenge Claudio and precipitate the righting of Don John's manipulations. In his first chapter Jacobs lays out the scriptural and Augustinian backgrounds for his project and the difficulties faced by his hermeneutic of love. In successive chapters he takes up the role that knowledge, suspicion, kenosis, and justice play in that hermeneutic. These chapters are separated by interludes in which Jacobs discusses novels and other books that raise the question of interpretation; he uses these as examples, positive and negative, of the hermeneutics of love. Accordingly, in Henry James's Figure in the Carpet the narrator's desire to initiated into the secret of Hugh Vereker's work is, in Jacobs' reading, Gnostic pursuit of understanding reserved for the elect; the narrator's goal is the opposite of charitable interpretation, which is open to all. On the other hand, Jane Tompkins' reflections about Buffalo Bill in West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (1992) enact Jacobs' hermeneutic, for in writing about both his virtues and his vices Tompkins tries to see the whole reality of Buffalo Bill and the values he represented. Moreover, she recognizes that the violence she finds so repulsive in Cody's actions is one of which she too is capable. Finally, there is postlude in which Jacobs takes up the effects of charitable interpretation on its practitioners, and he ends by suggesting the deeply comedic nature of that interpretation. Jacobs' argument is shaped by his reservations about theory and his belief in kerygmatic theology. Jacobs is not phobic about theory; in fact, he knows it well enough to explicit about where he parts company with it. For example, though he grants language tremendous importance, he is unwilling to see books as a proliferation of signs or verbal instantiations of ideological forces but he turns the vertex to see them, instead, as personal acts--answerable acts (1). Similarly, his book centers less on intellectual argument than on proclamation of charity. As he explores various understandings of the relationship between and knowledge, Jacobs uses Mikhail Bakhtin's work as bridge between Aristotelian and Christian concepts of love, virtue, and relational goods. He does not seek to appropriate Bakhtin as crypto-Christian, but he does point out: It may that Bakhtin's early account of interpretation both reinforces and is reinforced by Christian theology--in other words, that Bakhtin's charitable hermeneutics is justified by the appeal to the key convictions of the Christian faith, whereas, conversely, those convictions may best put into hermeneutical practice by Bakhtin's prescriptions (52). …

Theatres of the lie: 'crazy' deception and lying as drama

In this article, the author argues that lying is drama, theatre, which brings about transition, reflection, reversal and involvement of the participants in the drama. By means of ethnographic data of a psychiatric ward, the author shows that lying of mental patients is not pathological, but a ritual of affliction. By using Turner's theory about rituals and performance and Goffman's theory about presentation of the self it will be showed that lying serves the redefinition of reciprocity and solidarity. With the help of Bakhtin's work on Rabelais, the author discusses the nature of the drama of the lie. It is concluded that a perspective on lying as theatre may be of use outside psychiatric wards and will occur in imbalanced power relationships.

‘Thou Art a Scholar, Speak to it...’ - on Spaces of Speech: A Script

This article argues, based on the work of Bakhtin and de Certeau, that there is no aesthetics without politics and that all academic discourse and practices are enacted through aesthetic forms with inherently political and ethical effects. The article is written in a script-form with indications on how to perform it, acting out or ‘performing’ in a direct way rather than adding to the arguments already present in organizational literature. In a prologue (which can be read after reading the script by readers who do not want to harm its open impact), we discuss aspects of this choice: through the use of a different form for telling a story, we want to focus on the political and ethical implications of an aesthetic approach to organizing and how this can influence scholarly work. The script wants to move readers through various spaces of speech where society becomes organized. Through such movements we want to contribute to the imagination of possible ways of ‘performing oneself’ as an academic citizen in society. As an imaginative experiment, this article hopes to inspire scholars to (re)consider their habitual forms of publication and public action, and to address the question of ‘how to speak to it’ including the question of aesthetic genres and societal relationships.

Madaz Publications: Polyphonic Identity and Existential Literacy Transactions

In this article, Bob Fecho and Aaron Green discuss issues of identity, existence, and literacy,drawing primarily upon three pieces of writing—a rap, an essay, and an op-ed piece —written by Green in Fecho's high school classes and during his first year of college. Building on the work of Bakhtin, Delpit, Gordon, and Rosenblatt, Fecho and Green examine the ways in which Green uses his writing to explore his identities as provocateur, mainstream writer, and outsider. Green's writing and his ongoing conversation with Fecho, his teacher and mentor, are used to show the polyphonic nature of identity construction, the ways identity transactions are connected to literacy, and the importance of such transactions for teachers and students.

Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy

This book makes a radical break with earlier interpretations of Bakhtin's work. Using recent Russian scholarship, Ken Hirschkop explodes many of the myths which have surrounded Bakhtin and his work and lays the ground for a new, more historically acute sense of his achievement. Through a comprehensive reading of Bakhtin's work, Hirschkop demonstrates that his discussion of the philosophy of language, literary history, popularfestive culture, and the phenomenology of everyday life revolved around a lifelong search for a new kind of modern ethical culture. A detailed examination of the major works reveals the careful interweaving of philosophical and historical argument which makes Bakhtin at once so compelling and so frustrating a writer. Hirschkop treats Bakhtin not as a metaphysician or a philosopher for the ages, but as a writer inevitably drawn into the historical conflicts produced by a modernizing and democratizing Europe. As a consequence, Bakhtin becomes a more sober but also more original writer, with a striking contribution to make to the definition of the democratic project.

The hero at the bar of eternity: the Bakhtin Circle's juridical theory of the novel

The work of the Bakhtin Circle has juridical foundations that derive from neo-Kantian philosophy. The work of Hermann Cohen, Max Scheler and Georg Simmel are of special importance. An examination of this intellectual tradition leads to an examination of some of the works of Voloshinov, Bakhtin, Pumpianskii and Kagan, highlighting the centrality of the juridical person and the structures of judgement in the now famous and influential Bakhtinian theory of the novel. Bakhtinian theory also has implications for social theory more widely, as recent work has shown. An analysis of the juridical foundations of the theory is important for understanding the nature of the theory and assessing its usefulness for contemporary theory.

Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal by Cynthia A. Ruder (review)

MLR, 96. I, 200I MLR, 96. I, 200I secondarymaterialon Bakhtinshows that this issue has not been made the focus of sustained study, although the claim on thejacket that it is the 'firstto examine the influence of Christianity'on Bakhtin'swork is certainly an overstatement. Coates presents a cogent reading of Christian motifs in Bakhtin, particularlyfocusing on the ideas of God, the Fall, Incarnation and Love. The strategy is particularly successfulin drawingour attention to the Christianresonancesin Bakhtin's'Author and Hero in AestheticActivity'of the mid-I92os, and a good case ismade in tracing the development of these themes in Bakhtin'slater work,when theological imagery becomes less apparent. Coates's argument, from which the book's title derives, is that the figure of the author has directlytheological connotations, but the figure is 'exiled' in the workfrom the end of the 1920s, only able to articulatehis or her own perspective through the interaction of the voices of characters.This is the kenotic incarnationof God in the modern world. One of the book's strengthsis the way Bakhtin'swork is shown to develop and change. However, in concentrating solely on Christian aspects Coates fails to examine how Bakhtin draws on German idealist philosophy, some of it Jewish (Cohen and Cassirer), in which many of the same features are found without a Christian gloss. Religion had a specific place in most idealist philosophy of the period (Simmel, Scheler, Natorp) on which Bakhtindrew, which is not considered here. Although this is clearly not Coates's area of expertise, the fact that there is even no consideration of the extent to which Bakhtin used religious terms in the absence of an establishedRussianphilosophical discoursemakes the applicationof theology to Bakhtin'sworkrathertoo direct in many cases. The weakestpart of the book is the 'strawman' argument of the chapter 'WasBakhtin a Marxist?'which draws superficial points of contrast between the works of Bakhtin and that of Voloshinovand Medvedev. The latteraretreatedas orthodoxMarxists.The section which contrasts Bakhtin's notion of dialogue with dialectics without reference to any of Marx or Hegel's writings is unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, with these reservations, Coates presents a well-written and reasoned analysis of Christian motifsthat is a realcontributionto burgeoningBakhtinscholarship. UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD CRAIG BRANDIST Making Histoy for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal. By CYNTHIAA. RUDER. Gainesville:UniversityPressof Florida. I998. xvi + 248 pp. $49.95. The White Sea Canal was built with slave labour in appalling conditions, without proper equipment and without any reference to cost and efficiency, or even need. Solzhenitsynreasonablystatesthatsome I00,000 slavelabourersdiedwhileworking on the project in the firstwinter. Affidavitspresented by Viktor Kravchenkowhen conducting, and winning, a lawsuitagainstthe FrenchCommunistpaper, LesLettres Franfaises,corroborate the basic picture: ferocious treatment of slave labourers, miserable conditions and heavy loss of life. Comparisons with the building of the Panama and Suez Canals are, therefore, preposterous and odious. Notions of perekovka, the reforging of prisoners, were intended for the gullible, especially Westernintellectualsand the well-heeled literati,who duringthe I930Smade their many pilgrimages,courtesyof the Soviet state, to pay homage to Stalin'sPotemkin villages.Nothing publishedin theglasnost period in any way contradictsthe case for the prosecution which was alreadywell establishedbefore I987. So while one can welcome any attemptto fillin the lacunae, thebasicpictureof a slave-labourproject with huge lossof life remainsintact. secondarymaterialon Bakhtinshows that this issue has not been made the focus of sustained study, although the claim on thejacket that it is the 'firstto examine the influence of Christianity'on Bakhtin'swork is certainly an overstatement. Coates presents a cogent reading of Christian motifs in Bakhtin, particularlyfocusing on the ideas of God, the Fall, Incarnation and Love. The strategy is particularly successfulin drawingour attention to the Christianresonancesin Bakhtin's'Author and Hero in AestheticActivity'of the mid-I92os, and a good case ismade in tracing the development of these themes in Bakhtin'slater work,when theological imagery becomes less apparent. Coates's argument, from which the book's title derives, is that the figure of the author has directlytheological connotations, but the figure is 'exiled' in the workfrom the end of the 1920s, only able to articulatehis or her own perspective through the interaction of the voices of characters.This is the kenotic incarnationof God in the modern world...

Object Lessons: Men, Masculinity, and the Sign Women

Previous articleNext article No AccessObject Lessons: Men, Masculinity, and the Sign WomenRobyn WiegmanRobyn Wiegman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 26, Number 2Winter, 2001 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495597 Views: 24Total views on this site Citations: 16Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 2001 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Joe Parker Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly , by Judith Butler, Women's Studies 47, no.55 (Aug 2018): 579–583.https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2018.1485408Marcella De Marco The ‘engendering’ approach in audiovisual translation, Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 28, no.22 (Aug 2016): 314–325.https://doi.org/10.1075/target.28.2.11demChris Beasley Caution! Hazards ahead: Considering the potential gap between feminist thinking and men/masculinities theory and practice, Journal of Sociology 51, no.33 (Sep 2015): 566–581.https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783314553317Becky Francis Gender monoglossia, gender heteroglossia: the potential of Bakhtin's work for re-conceptualising gender, Journal of Gender Studies 21, no.11 (Mar 2012): 1–15.https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.639174Ariane Blayac, Claire Conilleau, Claire Delahaye, Hélène Quanquin Critical Masculinities, Culture, Society and Masculinities 3, no.11 (Oct 2011): 3–12.https://doi.org/10.3149/CSM.0301.3Jyotirmaya Tripathy The truncated narrative of gender and development, International Journal of Development Issues 8, no.11 (Jun 2009): 4–17.https://doi.org/10.1108/14468950910967038Christina Goulding, Michael Saren Performing identity: an analysis of gender expressions at the Whitby goth festival, Consumption Markets & Culture 12, no.11 (Feb 2009): 27–46.https://doi.org/10.1080/10253860802560813Becky Francis, Christine Skelton ‘The self-made self’: analysing the potential contribution to the field of gender and education of theories that disembed selfhood, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 29, no.33 (Sep 2008): 311–323.https://doi.org/10.1080/01596300802259095Becky Francis Engendering debate: how to formulate a political account of the divide between genetic bodies and discursive gender?, Journal of Gender Studies 17, no.33 (Sep 2008): 211–223.https://doi.org/10.1080/09589230802204241LAURA OGDEN The Everglades Ecosystem and the Politics of Nature, American Anthropologist 110, no.11 (Apr 2008): 21–32.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00005.xMarysia Zalewski Survival/Representation, (Jan 2006): 25–42.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800892_2 Susan Gubar Empathic Identification in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces: Masculinity and Poetry after Auschwitz Gubar, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no.11 (Jul 2015): 249–276.https://doi.org/10.1086/340912Richa Nagar, Victoria Lawson, Linda McDowell, Susan Hanson Locating Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization*, Economic Geography 78, no.33 (Feb 2009): 257–284.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2002.tb00187.xRobyn Wiegman Academic Feminism Against Itself, NWSA Journal 14, no.22 (Jul 2002): 18–37.https://doi.org/10.2979/NWS.2002.14.2.18Sally L. Kitch Claiming Success: From Adversity to Responsibility in Women's Studies, NWSA Journal 14, no.11 (Apr 2002): 160–181.https://doi.org/10.2979/NWS.2002.14.1.160 Recent Scholarship, Journal of American History 88, no.44 (Mar 2002): 1633–1682.https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/88.4.1633

Comparative Literature and Cultural Identity

In her article, Literature and Cultural Identity, Jola Skulj proposes a framework inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin's work. Skulj argues that the validity of cultural identity cannot be an equivalent to the measure of originality of an inherent national subjectivity in it. Such an idea of identity concept, quite acceptable in the nineteenth century, is insufficient to the views in literary studies today. From the standpoint of comparative literature, cultural identity exists only through its own deconstruction and permanent multiplication of several cultural relations. The identity principle of individual cultures is in fact established through the principle of otherness or -to use Bakhtin's terminology -through the principle of dialogism. As any individuality, cultural identity is a meeting point of several cross-cultural implications. It is of a complex plurivocal character, open to its own changes in order to preserve its own being in a new context of interests. Skulj argues that cultural identity is genuinely an intertext expressed in many instances in and via culture texts including literature. Thus, permanently re-interpreted cultural identity undoubtedly refers to the field of research of cross-cultural interactions and such a concept of cultural identity pre-eminently belongs to an expanded field of comparative studies. Jola Skulj, Literature and Cultural Identity page 2 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.4 (2000):

Inside dialogical realities: From an abstract‐systematic to a participatory‐wholistic understanding of communication

As participants in a ceaseless flow of speech entwined, dialogically‐structured, social activity, what matters to us are “once‐occurrent events of Being” (Bakhtin, 1993). Such events are meaningful to us from within that flow in terms of the further specification they give to it. Due to its internal structuring as an indivisible whole, all our traditional attempts to understand this flow and the events specifying it from the outside, in terms of abstract‐systematic frameworks of our own devising, are bound to fail. We need to set ourselves new goals in our research: that of critically refining and elaborating our already existing practices by intertwining into them reflective practices of a dialogical kind. The work of Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, and Goethe orients us toward the kind of practices required.

Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Note on translation and citation 1. Introduction 2. Fall and Incarnation in 'Towards a Philosophy of the Act' 3. The aesthetic gospel of 'Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity' 4. Was Bakhtin a Marxist? The work of the Bakhtin Circle, 1924-29 5. Falling silent: the critical aesthetic of Problems of Dostoevsky's Creative Work 6. The exiled author: 'Discourse in the Novel' and beyond 7. Christian motifs in Bakhtin's carnival writings 8. The fate of Christian motifs in Bakhtin's work Notes Bibliography Index.

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

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

The Dialogics of Conversation: Power, Control, Vulnerability

This essay takes up three quite different discourses—Mikhail Bakhtin's work on speech communication and speech genres; Friedrich Nietzsche's thinking on genealogical philosophy and the will to power; and Gregory Bateson's work on the cybernetics of mind and nature—in order to theorize the conditions of discursive possibility for transitioning from dialectic to dialogic conversation. Missing in both Bakhtin's and Bateson's very different projects, however, are adequate theorizations of power. To address (the will to) power in ways that distinguish it from (the will to) control are Nietzsche's thoughts on genealogical philosophy, the will to power, relations of force, the eternal return, and the being of becoming, each of which speak to power in necessarily different ways. With those distinctions made, I specify several correspondences between speech genres and cybernetic minds as a theoretical context for Nietzsche's thinking. Given those correspondences, discursive formations can be theorized as self-organizing systems. Such systems incorporealize selves as dialogic subjectivities, and such selves are always already unfinalizable and an open totality. Dialogics can now be theorized as the praxis of mediating competing and contradictory discourses. The point of this theoretical work is to specify conversation practices that effect movement between dialectic and dialogic genres of speech communication. By way of extending these lines of thinking, I sketch some theoretical ideas for a dialogics of conversation.

Bakhtin in the Classroom: What Constitutes a Dialogic Text? Some Lessons from Small Group Interaction

At a time when powerful agencies in the UK are advocating whole class teaching as an element of successful classroom practice (particularly directed at primary classrooms in relation to the teaching of numeracy and literacy), I seek in this paper to examine the potential of Small Group Interaction (SGI) to provide significant linguistic opportunities which, I argue, whole class teaching is less well placed to deliver. To do this, I shall compare data of two groups of children from the same classroom engaged on the same small group activity. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin (and Wertsch's interpretations of Bakhtin) I shall seek to identify both monologic and dialogic features in the children's discourse, tracing the origins of monologic discourse in the practices of Whole Class Interaction (WCI) - the dominant genre of the classroom. Following Bakhtin's account of addressivity and speech genre, I shall claim a role for dialogic talk in any classroom based on sociocultural principles of learning.

Ethics, Politics and the Potential of Dialogism

AbstractWhen, in the early 1980s the ideas of post-structuralism seemed rampant within academic critical theory, the appearance of the flawed English translation of Mikhail Bakhtin's central essays on the novel seemed to offer a very promising alternative perspective.1 Bakhtin's model of discursive relations promised to guard the specificity of discourse from being obscured by a web of determinations, while allowing the development of an account of the operations of power and resistance in discourse that could avoid the nullity of Derrida's hors-texte and the irresponsible semiotic hedonism of the later Barthes. Marxist theorists such as Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Allon White immediately and effectively seized upon the translated work of the Bakhtin circle to bolster their arguments, but, as translations of the earlier and later philosophical material appeared, it became apparent that the relationship between work of the circle and the Marxist tradition was very problematic. With this, the American anti-Marxist Slavists – some of whom had been responsible for certain of these translations – moved onto the offensive, arguing that Bakhtin's work was fundamentally incompatible with, and in principle hostile to, Marxism. Occasionally, they went further, arguing that Bakhtin was quite unconcerned with politics and questions of power, being an ethical, or even a religious philosopher before all else. The Americans did have a point. Bakhtin certainly was not a Marxist and the Marxism of some of his early colleagues and collaborators was of a rather peculiar sort. Furthermore, the key problematic area was indeed Bakhtin's ethics which, it became ever more apparent, underlies his most critically astute and productive work and serves to blunt its political edge. Important points of contact between the work of the Bakhtin circle and Marxist theory do persist, however, as Ken Hirschkop and Michael Gardiner, among others, have continued to register. In this article, examining some of the sources of Bakhtin's philosophy, which have only just been revealed in the new Russian edition of his work, we shall analyse the features of Bakhtin's ethics that stifle the political potential of dialogic criticism, and we will suggest ways in which that potential may be liberated.