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Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Composition, and Rhetoric
Special Interest Group Fifty-Sixth Annual Convention Conference on College Composition and Communication National Council of Teachers of English San Francisco, California, Friday, March 18, 2005 Special Session on Russian Cultural Theory and Technologically Mediated Communication
What the Russian Third Renaissance Contributes to Contemporary
Approaches to Rhetoric and Communication
Filipp Sapienza University of Colorado-Denver fsapienz@carbon.cudenver.edu Although Bakhtin and Vygotsky are predominant in rhetoric and communication, their works emerged out of a larger cultural movement little understood in the West. In this movement, known as the Russian Third Renaissance, many language theorists grappled with the socio-political movements of Marxism, Russian Orthodox theology, Slavic nationalism, European philosophy, and modern developments in science and technology. In certain respects, Third Renaissance theorists sat on the cusp of cultural transformation familiar to those of us today interested in how rapid changes in culture and technology affect communication. Scholars might therefore benefit by drawing from this reservoir of innovative cultural theory that extends beyond Bakhtin and Vygotsky. One such important theoretical development of this time is known as Russian Acmeism. The Acmeists developed a rhetorical methodology rooted in a historical sense of dialogue using terms that are strikingly familiar to contemporary theorists interested in technologically aided communication. Acmeists characterized the process of rhetorical invention with agricultural and architectural metaphors. The same metaphors find expression today in the new and growing profession of "information architect." Acmeists also conceived writers as gardeners, a concept that resonates with the student-centered dialogic idea of nurturing rhetorical ideas from students rather than imposing them monologically. Acmeists developed a robust textual hermeneutics linking past and present voices in a historical dialogue in a manner that echoes the polyphonic sensibilities expressed by Bakhtin. Acmeists' texts are often read like collages rather than as sequentially ordered lines and passages, an outgrowth of the unorthodox views of time resulting from both physics and religion that also gave rise to Bakhtin's sense of the chronotope. Acmeists developed an intertextual poetics that draws forth constellations of referents not as distant chained-linked nodes located in another time or place. Rather, Acmeist intertextuality reflects a Talmudic chronology by collapsing historical textual events into a planar dimension through which a reader intermittently glimpses threads of ideas, themes, and vocabularies. A similar process occurs when electronic media, such as the HTML or XML web page, finds its meaning only through the reader's interaction with the text. Like a website or XML structured document, the Acmeist work is a potential rather than immediate experience. Acmeists also recycled texts, a process at the heart of the latest development in technical communication known as "single-sourcing." Recycled text calls forth strategies for the design of compact text modules that can apply to multiple contexts.
"And That's How You Get Dialectics": The Slippery Distinction between
Dialogue and Dialectics
Clay Spinuzzi University of Texas-Austin clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu "Dialogue and dialectics," Bakhtin writes tersely in one of his fabled notebooks. "Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness--and that's how you get dialectics" (Speech Genres 147). This pronouncement is perhaps Bakhtin's clearest and least veiled statement on the difference between dialogue and dialectics. In his other works, particularly the ones he wrote during the Stalinist period, the distinction is avoided or even blurred. Perhaps for that reason, North American scholars have tended to conflate the two, particularly scholars who have tried to forge productive Bakhtin-Vygotsky syntheses. That raises the question of how coherent such syntheses can be, if indeed the two concepts are so opposed as Bakhtin seems to think. Or to put it in Vygotskian terms: is there a contradiction at the heart of such syntheses? The question is important because Bakhtin-Vygotsky syntheses are proliferating. Activity theory-genre theory syntheses, for instance, have been deployed to study classrooms (e.g., Hovde; Russell; Russell & Yanez), workplaces and professional discourse (e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin; Spinuzzi; Wertsch); and technology use (e.g., Spinuzzi & Zachry). These syntheses tend to conflate dialogue and dialectics, or even to avoid the discussion altogether. Yet if there is a significant difference between the concepts, conflation is probably not the best way to handle it. In this presentation, I will systematically compare dialogue and dialectics. To nail down what is potentially a very slippery discussion, I will examine dialogue strictly as it is treated (both overtly and covertly) in the writings of Bakhtin and his first Bakhtin Circle, and compare it to dialectics strictly as it is treated in the works of Vygotsky and his Circle. Finally, I will discuss the implications (if indeed there are any actual implications) of the difference for North Americans attempting to synthesize the work of the two groups.
Monologism, Dialogism, and Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in the
Web-Page Interface
John Killoran University of Colorado-Denver jkillora@carbon.cudenver.edu Several researchers have found Bakhtin's vision of interlinked, pluralistic discourses to be evocative of discourses in digital media and have fruitfully applied such Bakhtinian concepts as dialogism to a variety of digital texts (e.g., Batson, 1998; Evans, 2000; Eyman, 1996; Landow, 1997). However, few researchers have yet employed Bakhtin's concepts to analyze the dialogic character of the most ubiquitous and arguably the most discursively diverse digital medium, the Web (cf. Endres and Warnick, 2003; Holt, 2003). Many Web pages must juxtapose different discourses within small patches of screen real estate, in particular organizational pages, which are typically produced by multiple content providers and must typically appeal to multiple audiences, each with its own profile of discourses. To analyze and explain the effects of such discursive juxtapositions, my paper adapts to the Web Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism, monologism, and centrifugal and centripetal forces. With these concepts, together with further contextual information, we can analyze whether the organization behind a Web page is dialogically admitting to its Web interface the voices of its various constituents, each with its own interests, or monologically restricting them behind an official organizational voice. To illustrate the efficacy of Bakhtin's vision, my paper applies his concepts to analyze a pair of government Web sites about forests, the forest industry, and the environment. Whereas the homepages of the two sites project divergent approaches to the discourses of their diverse audiences, a dialogic analysis of the new site's deeper levels reveals how the government's discursive strategy appears to favor the discourses of one audience at the expense of others. Program Committee: Frank Farmer, University of Kansas; Kay Halasek, Ohio State University; Deborah Mutnick, Long Island University; Filipp Sapienza, University of Colorado-Denver; and Jim Zappen, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Latest Update: 2005-08-15. Please send comments and/or corrections to Jim Zappen at zappenj@rpi.edu. |
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