Liberal Education, Writing, and the Dialogic Self

Abstract

For Mikhail Bakhtin, self-conscious participation in that struggle marks the free and educated consciousness—the dialogic self. As part of a college education designed to initiate students into reflexive use of the authoritative languages, the study of college writing should not permit students to retreat from the challenges presented by the demanding languages to languages with which they are already comfortable or to conform without struggle to the new academic languages. Bakhtin suggests that inventing characters who speak a particular social-ideological idiom is a good way to objectify those idioms and liberate ourselves from their authority. Bakhtin suggests that novelists make the entire heteroglot forum the object of their discourse, while scholars and teachers confine themselves to their specialized objects and their more decorous genres. The students' movement from one community to another is, as Bakhtin says, often predetermined and not decided by a thought process—a fact of requirements and schedules that separate communities.

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