Dialogue and Critique: Bakhtin and the Cultural Studies Writing Classroom

Abstract

Dialogue and Critique: Bakhtin and the Cultural Studies Writing Classroom I repeated the line, "the idea was so simple, anyone could [have] thought of it, but it was so obvious that it never occurred to me." I said that this was what a cultural critic needed to be able to do: to notice those simple-seeming, obvious things that usually go unnoticed. I said that this was what cultural theory was good for, helping us to see what is ordinarily invisible to the people who are actually members of the culture being studied. I said I thought this writer had understood that concept, and had become a cultural critic.-Kathleen Dixon (112) I n the excerpt above, Kathleen Dixon repeats what she obviously feels to be a crucial line from one of her student's papers, a line that expresses the kind of epiphany that would be pleasing to any writing teacher, but perhaps especially gratifying to those writing teachers who employ a cultural studies perspective in their classrooms. This is so because insight for the cultural studies teacher is not simply a fortuitous, cursory moment in the process of rhetorical invention but is, indeed, the very heart of cultural critique.I would like to suggest further, that what Dixon reveals in this passage may well be the central dilemma faced by instructors who teach from a cultural studies perspective-namely, the difficulty in making a liberatory Frank Farmer is an associate professor of English at East Carolina University where he teaches writing and graduate courses in rhetorical theory and history. His articles have previously appeared in Rhetoric Review, Focuses, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Studies, and elsewhere. He has recently edited a collection, Landmark Essays on Bakhtin, Rhetoric, and Writing. This article is part of a larger project to explore affinities between dialogue and theory, especially as they intersect in the writing classroom.

An Enriching Methodology

“…Farmer (1998) and Zappen (2004) alike comment extensively on Bakhtin's use of syncrisis and anacrisis and his affinity for the Socratic dialogue.…”

“…In the 6 years since the publication of A Pedagogy of Possibility(Halasek, 1999), rhetoricians and compositionists have done little more to pursue this line of inquiry.2. "The Problem of Speech Genres"(Bakhtin, 1986) and "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art"(Vološinov, 1976) both take up "hero" in less artistic terms but are less often cited in scholarship on Bakhtin and composition studies.3 Farmer (1998). andZappen (2004) alike comment extensively on Bakhtin's use of syncrisis and anacrisis and his affinity for the Socratic dialogue.…”

Bakhtin and Freire: Dialogue, dialectic and boundary learning

“…Nevertheless, a number of scholars see an affinity between Bakhtin and Freire (Farmer, 1998; Bowers, 2005; Philpott & Benyon, 2005; Pechey, 2007). Pechey (2007, p. 31) argues that, after Franz Fanon, Bakhtin's project finds particular resonance in South America and is ‘most closely paralleled in the pedagogic writing of Paulo Freire ... and the theatre of Augusto Boal’.…”

“…Farmer (1998, p. 192) sees Freire as ‘a thinker quite distinct from Bakhtin but one who shares a number of theoretical affinities with Bakhtin's understanding of dialogue’. My own work (Rule, 2004) locates Bakhtin's and Freire's notions of dialogue within a genealogy that stretches back to the Socratic dialogues of Plato and includes, more recently, Buber and Habermas.…”

"If this stuff matters, why isn't it being shared?" : citations, hyperlinks, and potential public futures of online writing in rhetoric and composition.

“…a Bakhtinian concept such as "Bakhtinian dialogism" (Juzwik, 2004) or "Bakhtinian carnival" (Rouzie, 2001). Finally, four of the essays used "a Bakhtinian approach" (Farmer, 1998) to research, taking a term or concept or category from Bakhtin and structuring the entirety of a study or other analytic project around it, such as Jeffrey T.…”