Chapter 4 - The Bridge to Rhetoric (Continued)

As the current work of Elbow and Flower would suggest, the expressive and cognitive schools that Faigley mentions as being distinct from social constructionism appear instead to be moving toward a unified study of composition within social settings. As a result, it could be argued that social constructionism is quickly becoming the reigning paradigm in composition studies.

Kenneth Bruffee, one of the leading exponents of a social constructionist pedagogy, believes that a social view of language can help place the unified acts of reading and writing at the "center of the liberal arts curriculum and the whole educational process" ("Social Construction" 778). As Bruffee explains, social constructionism

assumes that the matrix of thought is not the individual self but some community of knowledgeable peers and the vernacular language of that community. That is, social construction understands knowledge and the authority of knowledge as community-generated, community-maintaining symbolic artifacts. Indeed, some social constructionists go so far in their nonfoundationalism as to assume . . . that even what we think of as the individual self is a construct largely community generated and community maintained. ("Social Construction" 777)

Bruffee believes that within literary studies, social constructionist thought is dominated by the work of two philosophers, Richard Rorty and Bakhtin, the latter of whom Bruffee sees as stressing "the `voices' in literary language . . . that are traceable to a diversity of social groups . . ." ("Social Construction" 783). Yet in composition studies, Bruffee feels social constructionist thought has focused mainly on the works of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, whose Thought and Language and Mind in Society had a tremendous influence on the field during the 1980s. Through a socio-linguistic approach to developmental psychology, Vygotsky posited that "we learn to use language instrumentally, `talking through' our tasks with another person and then internalizing that conversation as thought. In this way writing re-externalizes the language of internalized conversation" (Bruffee, "Social Construction" 785).

While no one can deny the tremendous influence that Vygotsky has had on composition theory, one could argue that Bakhtin's influence in recent years has become equal if not greater than that of Vygotsky. Yet to place these two Russian thinkers in competition as to theoretical influence is somewhat ludicrous considering the vast similarity of their ideas. In fact, in recent years whenever Vygotsky has been mentioned as a theoretical influence in composition studies, Bakhtin is often cited at the same time as having espoused similar ideas concurrently. [2] But because Bakhtin's ideas have been widely applied in both literature and composition studies, one could argue that his theories have had a greater influence than those of Vygotsky, who concerned himself mainly with child development and the relations between language and thought. And as James Thomas Zebroski has noted, in Bakhtin's ideas "we find a more fully elaborated model of writing as dialogue" (Thinking 174).

Indeed, Bakhtin seems to have become the theorist of choice in social constructionist philosophies of language and composition studies during the past decade. Donald Bialostosky, who was responsible for introducing Bakhtin's ideas into literary criticism during the 1980s, treats dialogics as distinct from other social constructionist views in that Bakhtin sees discourse as people involved in ideological struggles

over the meanings of things and the ownership of words. It de-emphasizes rhetorical commonplaces, calling attention instead to the appropriated, if not always proper, places of persons who have identified themselves with certain words, ideas, ways of talking, and social positions. ("Liberal Education" 15)

In fact, the insights that Bakhtin had into the dialogic nature of language acquisition are the prime influence that his thought has had on composition studies. As John R. Edlund has noted, Bakhtin's dialogics is "more than a linguistic [process]; it is the fundamental process of human intellectual growth" (57). As a result, Edlund believes the composition classroom can be viewed as "an attempt to hasten and direct the appropriation/assimilation process," in which students predictably produce "unintentional heteroglossia and garbled internal dialogue" (61). The result is that teachers should no longer respond to grammar and syntax problems as errors, but instead as imperfect attempts to harness the voices of dialogic language into specific authorial intent:

Bakhtin's view of language as ideological through and through allows us to see syntactic and grammatical stumblings, as well as rhetorical failures, as possible manifestations of ongoing social and cognitive processes, rather than simply as deficiencies of skill. It also allows us to see substantial incoherence as a possible sign of intellectual increase to come. (Edlund 67)

Yet any attempts to apply Bakhtin's ideas mechanically to the writing classroom are bound to meet with failure, for his ideas serve mainly to provide composition instructors with tacit insights into the often difficult engagements that students have with their own texts and those of others. The role of the teacher thus becomes one of helping students guide their processes of transforming "authoritative discourse" into "internally persuasive discourse," and then helping them shape the disparate internal and external voices of their lives into a text voicing their own intentions.

As Nancy Welch has noted, Bakhtin helps us see writing not just as a means of private reflection or public production, but "rather as the dynamic meeting of reflection and production: a complex and ongoing interplay among personal and public voices" (494). By being keenly aware of how the often discordant inner voices of our students operate within this interplay between reflection and production, Welch believes the writing teacher can open up a dialogue that helps guide students' language development:

Through responses that awaken new words and open up the possibilities for continued dialogue and continued learning, a teacher can help a student . . . to continue this evolution from "reciting by heart" to claiming and asserting the power of her own words. And through this evolution, [the student] takes charge not only of a particular text and a particular revision but also of the person she is and the person she is becoming. (501)

In a similar view, Joy S. Ritchie states that the various linguistic influences our students bring to the classroom contribute to their "confusion and anxiety" as well as the "rich texture of possibilities for writing, thinking, and for negotiating personal identity" (157). Ritchie feels that Bakhtin's ideas show us that we learn "by appropriating various voices from the community and transforming those into our own unique idioms" (173).

Most of the above authors have focused on how Bakhtin can illuminate our understanding of individual student discourse as being an assimilation of both external and internal influences. But Bakhtin's ideas have also been used to extend these dialogic views of authorship into the field of collaborative writing, as Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford have done in Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. As an example of those literary theorists who have informed their study of collaborative writing practices, Ede and Lunsford state that "Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossic language implies a polyphonic self, one that can never constitute the single `voice' traditionally ascribed to the author" (92).

Ede and Lunsford are not the only ones to have cited Bakhtin as support for a collaborative composition pedagogy. Janet Eldred also mentions Bakhtin as support for a collaborative view of composing, which she believes will gain even greater prominence with the advancement of computer technology, especially local area networks that link "not just terminal with terminal, but individual with individual or groups, mind with minds" (216).

Likewise, Timothy Weiss evokes the Bakhtin Circle as primary theoretical support for a collaborative model of communication, showing how Bakhtin's ideas "strengthen the weaknesses within Bruffee's theoretical foundation for collaborative learning-writing . . ." (39). Weiss sees Bruffee, in his A Short Course in Writing, erroneously "collaps[ing] any difference between knowledge on the one hand and opinions and beliefs on the other" (35). In contrast, Weiss believes Bakhtin, in one of his later notebook entries, [3] firmly distinguished between the two:

In Bakhtin's division, the natural and human sciences have different ends as well as different foci: the end of the former is knowledge, whereas the end of the latter is understanding . . . . In sum, the natural sciences seek to "know" objects, whereas the human sciences seek to "understand" signs, texts, discourses. (40)

In a recent bibliographic essay in College Composition and Communication, Helen Rothschild Ewald presents a fairly comprehensive overview of Bakhtin's influence in composition studies, though she argues that most scholars citing Bakhtin have ignored key elements of his work -- such as his concepts of "answerability" and the "hero" (339). She also sees varying interpretations of Bakhtin's theories within composition studies as evidence of the field's struggle between an increasingly entrenched social constructionism and an emerging externalist view, which transforms "the social perspective by making situatedness the definitive quality of communicative interaction and by denying the dualism of self and society" (338).

As a prime example of this externalist view, Ewald cites the work of Thomas Kent, who builds on his earlier attempts to formulate a "paralogic rhetoric" by synthesizing Sophistry and poststructuralism. [4] In his more recent work, Kent sees Bakhtin as taking an "assiduously externalist position" that rests on two basic propositions: 1) that language is holistic and achieves meaning only in concert with a "complex network of other utterances," and 2) that communication takes place within a dialogic sphere that affords no room for private language ("Hermeneutics and Genre" 283). For Kent, Bakhtin's concept of speech genres is essential for moving beyond strictly cognitive views of composition that are rooted in the rationalist tradition and often emphasize internal writing processes over social context. Instead, Bakhtin helps us forge a unified concept of "communicative interaction" free of Cartesian dualities:

When we understand that communicative interaction takes place largely through genres and . . . that genres are public constructs -- and not internal transcendental categories -- we no longer need to think of the production and the reception of discourse in terms of internal cognitive processes that, in turn, lead directly to the old Cartesian problems of skepticism and relativism. Because all communicative interaction takes place through the utterance and is consequently genre bound, both the production and the reception of discourse become thoroughly hermeneutical social activities and not the internal subjective activities of a private mind. ("Hermeneutics and Genre" 302)

Ewald believes, however, that while Bakhtin has some similarities with the externalists, mainly his "stance toward old Cartesian dualisms, such as self/other," he is neither "fully social constructionist nor externalist" and therefore "seems yet to straddle our theoretical fences" (340). Yet she tends to overemphasize the theoretical differences between social constructionism and externalism, ignoring how the two were born of the conflicts between rationalism and poststructuralism.

Ewald's criticism of the various interpretations of Bakhtin within composition studies also presumes a monologic understanding of theory formation within any given discipline; as Louise Wetherbee Phelps has noted, theory development in composition studies often follows an "arc" from practice to theory and back again in a dialogic process that deepens over time ("Images of Student Writing" 37-48). Given such a view of theory formation, it seems logical that Bakhtin's views should be appropriated in a variety of practical ways before returning to theoretical consensus.

Additionally, the two Bakhtinian terms that Ewald says have been ignored in composition theory -- "answerability" and the "hero" -- have been taken up recently by James Thomas Zebroski, whose book Thinking Through Theory explores the impact that both Vygotsky and Bakhtin have had on composition studies. Zebroski believes Bakhtin's concept of "answerability," wherein art and life must be answerable to one another, can serve as a model for establishing a dialogue between theory and practice (Thinking 2). Furthermore, Zebroski states in an earlier article that the "hero" of any text is a "super-addressee who is infinitely distant from...dialogue, but whose responsive understanding of it is assumed . . ."; for Zebroski, the hero is a summation of all "those voices through history, both from the past and from the future" that account for communication in the absence of immediate dialogue ("A Hero" 37). Zebroski believes this concept of the hero has given him greater insight into student papers, allowing him to hear the "history of our dialogue . . . as I read a student text . . . . I listen for the voices. I join the dialogue. I search for the hero . . ." ("A Hero" 38).

Drawing deeply on Vygotsky's theories and Bakhtin's dialogics, Zebroski eschews traditional, library-bound research assignments in favor of ethnographies that turn students' attention to how language operates in subcultures outside the classroom. After observing first hand how language is used in these communities, the students then report their findings to their own "collective of developing writers," who in turn use the ethnographic method to investigate the uses of language in their own writing community (Thinking 191). Zebroski believes such ethnographies not only help students to understand the dialogic nature of language within a living context, but represent a more effective means for learning how to synthesize large amounts of information and to develop critical thinking skills, both of which students can later apply to traditional research assignments.

At the same time, Zebroski believes Bakhtin's theories can help teachers become more sensitive to the internal struggles that take place in the writing processes of both themselves and their students. For Zebroski, Bakhtin's ideas call into question traditional concepts of textual structure and unity and help explain how coherence in writing often is achieved through the difficult task of interior dialogue:

How often do we experience this otherness within our own individual utterance and take it to be a symptom that something is wrong, that we are not being "structured" enough, that we are not being purposive and single-minded enough? Bakhtin suggests that such conflict is natural, even inevitable, and that we need to accept such dialogue or quarrel as a starting point since real coherence in a text may come about less because the many voices have been suppressed and silenced, than because they have become dialogic, speaking with, even at times yelling at, each other and the "writer" who is made up of this community of voices. Maybe we need to be more open to accepting this plurality and this struggle. (Thinking 232).

The insistence of such scholars as Phelps and Zebroski on a firm connection between theory and practice is what has marked composition studies as an academic field of growing significance and influence in recent years. And as mentioned earlier, the social constructionist emphasis on the role that language plays in the generation of knowledge within any given discipline has been the driving force behind the most practical movement to arise from English studies in quite some time -- Writing Across the Curriculum.

But with the present dichotomy between literary criticism and composition studies, how are we in English studies to play the central role that has been cast for us in demonstrating how literacy skills are at the heart of all learning? The answer is that we cannot. Yet as we have seen, Bakhtin's dialogic theories of language and literacy and his simultaneous influence in both fields can serve as a much needed bridge between the differences that now divide us and prevent us from assuming a central position within the emerging information age. For what is at stake is nothing less than the question of whether we will rule technology, or whether technology will rule us.

Chapter End Notes