http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/13.2/Articles/12.htm

JAC 13.2 (1993)

One Students Many Voices: Reading, Writing, and Responding with Bakhtin

Nancy Welch

The means to form such an understanding can be found in Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. In his "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin advances a view of writing not solely as the private reflection of experience and not solely as the public production of a fixed text but rather as the dynamic meeting of reflection and production: a complex and ongoing interplay among personal and public voices. "Form and content in discourse are one," Bakhtin says at the start of his essay, "once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon" (259). In this essay, I'd like to show how Bakhtin's understanding of discourse offers us a way of reading Linda's text beyond the boundaries of the content/form and personal/public dichotomies, a way that asks us to listen and speak back to a students many voices as he or she searches for the means to form experience in the contentious social arena of writing.

Negotiating Among Personal and Public Voices

But this movement from "reciting by heart" to "retelling in one's own words" is not simple and smooth (341). Bakhtin notes that there is often a "sharp gap" between "the authoritative word (religious, political, moral; the word of a father, of adults and of teachers, etc.)" and the "internally persuasive word that is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society" (342). It is through a continued dialogic and dialect'ical struggle between these two categories that the gap is bridged and the alien word is made ones own.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-422.