Beginning Writers: Diverse Voices and Individual Identity

Abstract

Writers and speakers are continually acting upon and transforming the language they assimilate, trying to resolve the dissonance among the voices they hear in the social network, and attempting to construct their own evolving voice. At the beginning of the semester students were intimidated by the teacher's instruction to find their own topics for writing. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of language is pervaded by a sense of the multiple influences and forces which are part of language development in individuals and communities. The language of the individual, of the community, or of the classroom is never a closed system, but instead is humming with "heteroglossia," a word Bakhtin uses to describe the rich mixture of genres, professions, personae, values, purposes, lifestyles, and ages which resonate against each other in all language situations. In Bakhtin's view, language inevitably shapes and reflects the evolving identity of individuals and communities.

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