This fragmentation reached its zenith in the 1970s with the advent of deconstruction as espoused by such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. While some tenets of deconstruction undoubtedly have enlivened professional discourse and illuminated our understanding of various texts, deconstructive critical practices have created a bewildering, often nihilistic view of language that turns upon itself and devours the very words it uses in discourse.
As a result of such divisive debates, no unifying paradigm emerged in either discipline, which in turn served to widen the existing gap between literary criticism and composition studies, though they continue to have much in common. However, several scholars in both fields have been pointing recently toward a theoretical union of the two disciplines. One such scholar in composition studies is Patricia Bizzell, who argues for a unified theory based on the similarities of each field's theoretical concerns. In her article, "On the Possibility of a Unified Theory of Composition and Literature," Bizzell notes how these similarities have led some theorists to examine trends in each other's discipline and to realize the concerns common to both:
[T]he cause of the similarity lies in the fact that both disciplines are attempting to come to terms with the same insight, that human beings make meaning when they use language. The writer does not put previously conceived ideas "into" words; she generates the ideas through the process of writing. And the reader does not simply take ideas up out of the words; rather, he generates his own version of the text through the process of reading. Both writing and reading are meaning-making processes, whether we are talking about the writing and reading of a literary masterpiece or a freshman essay. (176)
Much of this emphasis on the "meaning-making process" directly stems from various poststructuralist theories, which have rightly questioned earlier rationalist philosophies of language that assumed a direct connection between words and the objects they represent.
However, deconstruction seems to have dwelled on the problems of these earlier models by obsessively examining those areas where meaning falls apart and misses its mark. This negative view of language, which is similar to that of the Greek Sophists some 25 centuries earlier, has been countered in recent years by a host of "reconstructive" thinkers who have sought to move beyond the problems of language first defined by structuralism and have turned instead to examining how writers and readers create meaning in their textual encounters.
Among those reconstructive thinkers rising to critical prominence during the 1980s was the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose ideas emerged from the dark shadows of Soviet repression several years after their conception. Many theorists in English studies have hailed Bakhtin's philosophy of language as a breakthrough in the discursive logjam that has plagued the field ever since the advent of Derrida and deconstruction. What Bakhtin offered was a relatively simple, loose-knit system of language philosophy that provided an escape from the often destructive debates fostered by the theoretical prominence of poststructuralism and deconstruction.
In contrast to deconstruction, which views language and texts as nothing but the free play of signifiers, Bakhtin believes that all individual expression is ultimately the product of various voices that are linked to one another through the socially constituted fabric of language. We learn our language by assimilating the voices of others, and we speak back to our community of peers through re-externalized modes of discourse. This philosophy, known as dialogics, is supported by Bakhtin's concept of metalinguistics, in which the individual utterance is seen as the intersection of a speaker's specific intent and the listener's active response, which are in turn linked to one another through stable, yet often unconscious genres of speech.
In terms of literary criticism, Bakhtin believes the rise of the novel as the primary expressive form of Western literature depended in large part on its ability to accurately reflect the myriad voices of this dialogic sphere, which he refers to as "heteroglossia." These popular styles of discourse find their ultimate source in an ancient "carnival" sense of the world, in which unofficial forms of language served to subvert and overturn the official seriousness of authoritative discourse. In a similar way, Bakhtin's dialogics seeks to overturn what he calls "monologic" views of language that stem from earlier rationalist philosophies prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Bakhtin's social view of language, which places equal importance on speaker as well as listener, has also served to counteract one of poststructuralism's central tenets -- the so- called "death of the author." In this concept, reader response and language itself are viewed as the main vehicles of textual understanding, while authorial intent and meaning are supplanted in favor of theories that are both alienating to most readers and seem foreign to our everyday experience of language. As British novelist and critic David Lodge has argued, Bakhtin's thought has been instrumental in raising the author from the dead and bridging the gap between theory and the average reader:
Perhaps in the end Bakhtin's greatest contribution to contemporary criticism is . . . to have made a timely reaffirmation of the writer's creative and communicative power. This is an idea that structuralism (implicitly), and post-structuralism (explicitly) have sought to discredit and replace with theories about the autonomous productivity of texts and their readers. Readers outside the academy, however, continue to believe in the existence and importance of authors. This is one of several issues that have created a barrier of non-comprehension between academic and non-academic discussion of literature . . . . (7)
In effect, Bakhtin's ideas have restored a sense of harmony to Aristotle's rhetorical triangle by placing the author on an equal footing with his readers and texts. Yet as Charles Schuster argues, Bakhtin's dialogics has also radically altered the shape of this ancient geometrical model of communication by blurring traditional distinctions between writer, reader, and text in terms of both the reading and writing processes (595).
As a result, Bakhtin's philosophy of language has pushed theoretical debates beyond both the endless skepticism of deconstruction and the classical model of rhetorical theory. In doing so, his ideas have changed the future course of theory itself and present us with perhaps our first unified view of how language operates in both the writing and reading of textual discourse.
This thesis will trace the influence of Bakhtin's ideas in both literary criticism and composition studies during the past decade and demonstrate how a dialogic view of language helps point the way toward a unified theory of literature and composition. Bakhtin's ideas on the social nature of language have been viewed by many as primary theoretical support for a social constructionist view of language, which is increasingly being viewed as the reigning paradigm in both fields. And as we shall see in the conclusion, Bakhtin's dialogics also seems poised to help us explain the radical transformations our views of language will undergo during the electronic information age. Yet before examining Bakhtin's influence in both literary criticism and rhetorical theory, it is important to understand how an eccentric thinker working on the margins of Russian intellectual life arrived at conclusions that can lead us toward a unified theory of literature and composition.