Yet Bakhtin's dialogic view of language, with its simultaneous influence in both literary criticism and rhetorical theory, has given us the first inklings of what a theoretical union between the two disciplines might look like, even though a systematic, unified theory of literature and composition may forever remain a dream deferred. Though his ideas are scattered across several texts and have been interpreted in a variety of ways, Bakhtin is the first theorist popular enough in both fields to present an influential conceptual schema that explains how people acquire language and read and write texts. In this period of present disharmony, his growing influence in both disciplines should be cause for celebration. As Gregory Clark notes in his book Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation:
For people studying rhetoric and composition as well as for those studying literature, Bakhtin's work provides perhaps our most comprehensive explanation of the process through which social knowledge is constructed in a cooperative exchange of texts. However diverse its particular applications, Bakhtin's explanation persistently and explicitly affirms the two complementary assumptions about language that support a social constructionist point of view: that our language creates rather than conveys our reality . . . and that it does so in a process that is collaborative rather than individual . . . . (8-9)As English studies begins to move beyond its traditional scholastic solipsism toward a more active role at the center of modern education, Bakhtin's ideas seem to fill a definite need in formulating a general theory of how people read and write.
Bakhtin believed that our individual acts of expression, both written and oral, are the result of a difficult internal struggle in which the various voices of our past and present are linked to one another through the social web of language. We acquire language by internalizing the voices of others, and we spend our lives re-externalizing these assimilated forms in a never-ending dialogue with our peers. Additionally, each individual act of language takes shape and becomes meaningful in the space between ourselves and our audience and is highly dependent on our often unconscious choice of stable, yet transparent genres of both speech and text.
In addition to being influential in both literary criticism and rhetorical theory, Bakhtin's ideas seem similarly poised to help us explain the drastic changes the printed word will undergo as the result of new computer technologies, changes that should not be viewed as necessarily threatening to our humanist values. As Richard Lanham notes in his recent book, The Electronic Word, the presentation of words through the static textual display of print is quickly being replaced by the more fluid textual forms of the computer screen, which are radically altering our existing definitions of literacy. Lanham believes these new textual forms -- such as e-mail, network exchanges, and hypertext -- are shifting our intellectual perception back to the root source of Western rhetoric:
We can . . . think of electronic prose as moving back toward the world of oral rhetoric, where gestural symmetries were permitted and sound was omnipresent. Any prose text, by the very nature of the denial/expression tensions that create and animate it, oscillates back and forth between literate self-denial and oral permissiveness, but electronic text does so much more self-consciously, simply by the volatile nature of the written surface. A volatile surface invites us to intensify rather than subdue this oscillation, make it more rather than less self-conscious. (75)Lanham's descriptions of the "oscillations" that take place in any printed text and that are enhanced by the new textual forms of the computer age sound very much like the tension of "voices" that Bakhtin mentions in his dialogic philosophy of language. In contrast to our monological perception of unity in any given text, Bakhtin's dialogics demonstrates how our language, both oral and written, is saturated with the words of others and how our task as both authors and readers is to orchestrate these inherent oscillations of language into an illusion of textual unity.
Furthermore, while some may feel the electronic explosion of static textual forms serves to mark the death of the Western self, as exemplified in the linear forms of print, Lanham believes it achieves quite the opposite and brings literacy more in line with another oscillation that Western thinking has always exhibited. His description of how these new textual forms achieve this also bears a striking similarity to Bakhtin's position within current philosophies of language:
Allowing the simplicities neither of Arnoldian sincerity nor of deconstructive despair, [electronic literacy] will force these extremes into that bi-stable oscillation which has created our richly felt Western life since Plato and Isocrates first started it rocking two-and-a-half millenia ago. (25)Though this particular oscillation that Lanham mentions has more to do with the enduring conflict between philosophy and rhetoric, Bakhtin, who anchored his dialogic philosophy in the historical example of Socrates, seems to reside in the center of such an oscillation, taking into consideration both sides of recent debates about philosophy of language.
Of all the philosophies currently espoused within both literary criticism and composition studies, Bakhtin's dialogics seems to best explain the emerging textual revolution wrought by computer technology. As the static textual expressions of the print age give way to the dynamic texts of electronic literacy, Bakhtin's views on language, based on the oral origins of the word, help us to understand the new electronic literacy and how its dynamic textual forms interact with the "secondary orality" that Walter Ong believes television and the telephone have produced in our society.
Far from feeling alienated from this emerging electronic literacy, we in English studies should feel empowered by the new technologies, for they give us the ability to transfer the dialogic conflict of values displayed in various forms of literature into more accessible forms for those students who are learning, despite our efforts, via the mixed media of the electronic age. Digital dialogics can serve as a theoretical model for English studies in the twenty-first century.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley spins a tale of a futuristic dystopia in which the character of John the Savage finds sole comfort in the works of William Shakespeare. Raised on a Native American reservation far from the technological advances of a dehumanizing society, the Savage has memorized every word from a ragged copy of The Complete Works, which has somehow survived both temporal and technological destructive forces. When he is brought into the modern age, the Savage's musings on Shakespeare are foreign to the citizens of this world, which has banned books in favor of social conditioning lessons doled out over loudspeakers and through classroom lectures.
While our society is experiencing immense technological changes that some feel parallel those in Huxley's novel, it would be folly to suggest that Shakespeare's entire body of work is in danger of disintegrating into historical dust. The Bard has survived the ravages of time so far, and we have every reason to believe he will continue to do so in the future. But what Huxley's novel points out is the danger that advancing technology poses to our treasured human values and how such values, often residing in works of literature, can become lost in the chaotic changes of history. One has only to look at the Middle Ages to find historical examples of how many of the texts of antiquity, including Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, were lost for centuries before being recovered through the efforts of Petrarch and others at the advent of the Renaissance.
In a similar light, the seeming lack of interest that many incoming freshman have in the canonical texts of the academy has spawned dire warnings in recent years of a pending "literacy crisis," in which students have forsaken the traditional pleasures of text for the new-fangled visual delights of the television and movies. But perhaps this "crisis," as Lanham points out, is instead a revolution in technology, one akin to that of Gutenburg's printing press some 500 years before. Instead of engaging in petty squabbles over textual versus visual narrative, perhaps we in English studies should be looking outside the academy to examine the ways in which our society's concept of literacy is quickly changing as a result of computers and the mass media.
If The Bard is to escape the reservations of our brave new world, we must transform his works to digital, on-line forms of expression; his works must move from linear page to digital hypertext and multi-media visuals, to more holistic, electronic forums that rival the Globe Theatre in the scope of their presentation. Lanham believes that such emerging technologies, combined with other social and theoretical forces, will help return liberal arts to a central role in education, a repositioning that has already begun with the Writing Across the Curriculum movement (The Electronic Word 116).
Merrill Whitburn makes a similar argument in calling for more active participation by English departments in shaping the values of our emerging information society. Whitburn believes that the solely contemplative nature of many literary scholars, along with their gadfly attitude "toward the rest of academic and public and professional life," has kept English studies from assuming its proper place in the information age (238). He is also critical of these same scholars for their often disparaging attitude toward
a range of educators in areas such as speech, rhetoric, and journalism who wanted to move from a concern for the private life alone to a concern for the public and professional life as well. Although literary scholars have allowed these educators token development, they have tended to dismiss their aspirations as vocationalism, a term once again in currency. (246)Whitburn's point here is that if our humanist values are to survive into the future, than English studies must take a more active role in shaping how knowledge and information are to be preserved and presented in the emerging electronic age.
If we accept this challenge, then we can take advantage of "the extraordinary opportunity to move the humanities to the heart of American life, to be as much at the center of learning and society as the orator in classical antiquity" (Whitburn 247). In order to prevent the much-touted "information highway" from being dominated by commercial billboards and scientific information pitstops, we in English studies must put our theoretical differences behind us and become united in our efforts to preserve the humanist tradition well into the twenty-first century.
We have only to preserve this tradition in new forms, ones that will ensure the tradition's survival for centuries to come, for though Shakespeare's works were written in a context specific to Elizabethan England, they have survived these past centuries because of their wide-spread acceptance as being classical texts that speak to the human heart and mind beyond their original time. As Bakhtin understood too well, language itself has the power to move beyond the vagaries of specific time and to influence those in ages to come. In the last notebook entry before his death, published under the title "Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences," Bakhtin wrote:
There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of the past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue's subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a next context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. The problem of great time. (Speech Genres 170)