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Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Composition, and Rhetoric
Special Interest Group Conference on College Composition and Communication National Council of Teachers of English BAKHTIN-L@lists.rpi.edu Announcements Please send announcements to Jim Zappen at zappenj@rpi.edu. Announcements are posted as submitted, in the order of receipt, beginning with the most recent.
Rebirth of Dialogue, The
Tracing Genres through Organizations: In Tracing Genres through Organizations, Clay Spinuzzi examines the everyday improvisations by workers who deal with designed information and shows how understanding this impromptu creation can improve information design. He argues that the traditional user-centered approach to design does not take into consideration the unofficial genres that spring up as workers write notes, jot down ideas, and read aloud from an officially designed text. These often ephemeral innovations in information design are vital components in a genre ecology (the complex of artifacts mediating a given activity). When these innovations are recognized for what they are, they can be traced and their evolution as solutions to recurrent design problems can be studied. Spinuzzi proposes a sociocultural method for studying these improvised innovations that draws on genre theory (which provides the unit of analysis, the genre) and activity theory (which provides a theory of mediation and a way to study the different levels of activity in an organization). After defining terms and describing the method of genre tracing, the book shows the methodology at work in four interrelated studies of traffic workers in Iowa and their use of a database of traffic accidents. These workers developed an ingenious array of ad hoc innovations to make the database better serve their needs. Spinuzzi argues that these inspired improvisations by workers can tell us a great deal about how designed information fails or succeeds in meeting workers' needs. He concludes by considering how the insights reached in studying genre innovation can guide information design itself. Notice received May 21, 2004
Michael Spooner, Director Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition with Bakhtin Frank Farmer [I]f there is a single, guiding assumption that underwrites these essays, it is that within the dialogues we commence with our students, our publics, and ourselves, there is ample warrant for hopehope that through the words we share, the world we share likewise can be revised to include more voices, can be reimagined as a meeting place where, in Terry Eagleton's phrase, "people feel less helpless, fearful, and bereft of meaning" (184). It is my hope that these essays make some small contribution to that end. --from the Introduction In composition studies for the last two or three decades, Bakhtin has been especially influential through his theories of language, dialogue, and genre. His work is required reading in upper division and graduate rhetoric courses and is included in the recent major surveys if rhetoric. Frank Farmer has contributed important essays to the study of Bakhtin in composition, and in Saying and Silence he gathers some of those, along with several new essays, into a single volume. Scholars who specialize in Bakhtin will find this work engaging, but equally Farmer wants to explicate and apply Bakhtin for readers whose focus is teaching or some other nonspecialist dimension of writing scholarship. Farmer explores the relationship between the meaningful word and the meaningful pause, between saying and silence, especially as the relationship emerges in our classrooms, our disciplinary conversations, and encounters with publics beyond the academy. Each of his chapters here addresses some aspect of how we and our students, colleagues, and critics have our say and speak our piece, often under conditions where silence is the institutionally sanctioned and preferred alternative. He has enlisted a number of Bakhtinian ideas (the superaddressee, outsideness, voice in dialogue) to help in the project of interpreting the silences we hear, naming the silences we do not hear, and of encouraging all silences to speak in ways that are freely chosen, not enforced. What he offers, then, is a compact collection that addresses major areas of Bakhtinian thought and influence on composition practice to date. And he does this in a voice and style that will be accessible to the general scholar as well as the specialist and will be suitable for use with the advanced composition student, too.
$19.95 paper, ISBN 0-87421-414-9 Notice received March 29, 2001 THE ANNOTATED BAKHTIN BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edited by Carol Adlam and David Shepherd. MHRA Bibliographies, volume 1; London: Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2000. xxix + 413 pp. ISBN 1902653327. This is the first in a new series entitled MHRA Bibliographies. The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography draws its material from, and is intended as a companion to, the on-line Analytical Database of Work by and about the Bakhtin Circle: maintained by the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield, this is the most extensive electronic collection of bibliographical and analytical data relating to the Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and the members of the Bakhtin Circle (principally Mariia Iudina, Matvei Kagan, Pavel Medvedev, Lev Pumpianskii, Ivan Sollertinskii and Valentin Voloshinov). The work of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle has had enormous international impact across a range of disciplines, including literary and cultural theory, philosophy, history, anthropology, linguistics and psychology. The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography will provide scholars and students of Bakhtin with easy access to detailed information on research undertaken throughout the world in these and other fields. The text of The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography is in two parts. The first part comprises extensive bibliographical details of almost three hundred primary works (including information about translations and reprints). The second consists of almost one thousand entries containing analytical and annotated information about secondary literature dealing with Bakhtin the Bakhtin Circle in over twenty languages, allowing the principal trends in the development of Bakhtin studies to be discerned and traced. Consultation of the bibliography is facilitated by comprehensive name, title and subject indexes. For more information about The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography, go to http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/MHRA/
To consult the Analytical Database, go to http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/bakh/dbase.html Notice received January 18, 2001
Language For Those Who Have Nothing
COGNITION AND LANGUAGE: A SERIES IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS Bakhtin offers language as a social phenomenon and one that is fully embodied. Utterances are shown to be alive and enfleshed and their meanings realised in the context of given social dimensions. The organisation of this book corresponds with carnival practices of taking the high down to the low before replenishing its meaning anew. Thus early discussions of official language and the chronotope become exposed to descending levels of analysis and emphasis. Patients and practitioners are shown to occupy an entirely different spatio-temporal topography. These chronotopes have powerful borders and it is necessary to use the Carnival powers of cunning and deception in order to enter and to leave them. The book provides an overview of practitioners who have attempted such transgression and the author records his own unnerving experience as a pseudopatient. By exploring the context of psychiatry's unofficial voices: its terminology, jokes, parodies, and everyday narratives, the clinical landscape is shown to rely heavily on unofficial dialogues in order to safeguard an official identity.
Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers http://www.wkap.nl/book.htm/0-306-46502-7 Notice received January 2, 2001 Galin Tihanov *The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time* Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-19-818725-4 www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-818725-4 Notice received June 8, 2000
A PEDAGOGY OF POSSIBILITY by Kay Halasek "No one working in this line of inquiry has yet come close to [Halasek] in articulating Bakhtin's views with those of the authoritative voices in composition studies; no one has recognized and developed the implications of his work across the key topics of the field from disciplinarity to history to theory to pedagogy; no one has managed, as she has, to shift the ground of conversation in the field into Bakhtinian terrain, forcefully modifying the questions we need to ask and at the same time leaving open spaces for our investigating and debating them. This is one of the most lucid expositions and extensions of Bakhtin's work I have read in any field, and it is one of the most thoughtful, engaged, and potentially fruitful books I have read in the field of composition studies."--Don Bialostosky, Penn State University In a book that itself exemplifies the dialogic scholarship it proposes, Kay Halasek reconceives composition studies from a Bakhtinian perspective, focusing on both the discipline's theoretical assumptions and its pedagogies. Framing her discussions at every level of the discipline--theoretical, historical, pedagogical--Halasek provides an overview of portions of the Bakhtinian canon relevant to composition studies, explores the implications of Mikhail Bakhtin's work in the teaching of writing and for current debates about the role of theory in composition studies, and provides a model of scholarship that strives to maintain dialogic balance between practice and theory, between composition studies and Bakhtinian thought. Halasek's study ranges broadly across the field of composition, painting in wide strokes a new picture of the discipline, focusing on the finer details of the rhetorical situation, and teasing out the implications of Bakhtinian thought for classroom practice by examining the nature of critical reading and writing, the efficacy and ethics of academic discourse, student resistance, and critical and conflict pedagogy. The book ends by setting out a pedagogy of possibility, what Halasek terms elsewhere a "post-critical pedagogy" that redefines and redirects current discussions of home versus academic literacies and discourses. Kay Halasek is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University where she also serves as the director of the First-Year Writing Program. She is the author of A Brief Guide to Basic Writing and Writing as Action: Composing in the University and Beyond and is the editor of Landmark Essays on Basic Writing.
288 pages, 6 x 9 Notice received February 28, 2000 TITLE: Activity Theory and Social Practice: Cultural-Historical Approaches EDITORS: Seth Chaiklin, Marianne Hedegaard & Uffe Juul Jensen ISBN: 8772888113 FORMAT: 381p, Hb DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1999 PUBLISHER: Aarhus University Press PRICE: $34.95 DESCRIPTION: Activity theory and the cultural-historical approach to psychology have their roots in the research of Lev S Vygotsky and Alexei N Leontiev which began in the 1920s in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, this research tradition gained the attention of researchers, especially in Western Europe, and now enjoys expanding attention and interest throughout the world. This book presents some central theoretical topics and problems within the tradition. Highlights include one of Vasily Davydov's last papers in which he proposes a new structure for the study of activity. There are also cogent analyses of activity presented by Peter Tulviste, Bernd Fichtner and Vladislav Lektorsky. Also included are several examples of current research efforts that either expand the scope of the theoretical tradition or present challenges for further development. Highlights include discussions of gender issues by Martha Nussbaum and Vera John-Steiner; infant development by Jerome Bruner; and societal practices by Terence Turner and Ethel Tobach. In short this volume presents a good overview of where activity theory and cultural historical psychology has been...and where it is going.
The book is available in the USA either via bookstores or direct from: Notice received February 3, 2000
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