Review_Author: Renee Hayes
Book_Author: Mikhail Bakhtin
Book_Title: Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Date: 4/30/99
Time: 12:10:35 PM
Remote Name: 128.175.144.209
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It seems that whatever Bakhtin is writing about, he is concerned with the necessity of viewing the part as part of a whole. I think he would argue that, in general, to look at something, whether it is a word, or a novel, or a historical event, or a person, in order to understand that thing you need to understand the forces of past and present context that give it meaning. It is hard, by the way, to draw together some general idea of Bakhtin from the different essays I read in this book (because they are about really different things...literature, history, culture, language, etc.). So I was always trying while I read to draw connections, to be able to see some synthesis between what Bakhtin said about words, for example, and what he said about historical events, mountains, Italians, etc. Well, this guy has a lot to say about everything. Well, I know everybody read the essay on Speech Genres. I believe this is the most coherent of the essays, and so I think I understood it pretty well. The three later essays in the book, “The Problem of the Text,” “From Notes Made in 1970-71” and “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences,” are really just from his notebooks, and not easy to understand because of that. I think maybe Bakhtin might suggest that these “essays” are hard to read precisely because they do not employ some of the implicit conventions of the essay genre that I am expecting...propositional statements, leading to examples, a certain type of closure...Well, actually, many of the sentences don’t even have verbs. And often instead of examples he writes a note to himself, something like “find a good clear example for this.” I did notice, however, that these final non-essays did have some parts that clarified the things he said in the first three essays. For example, the “Problem of the Text” kind of clarified and extended the idea of who participates in an utterance, which he talks about in “Speech Genres.” He says in “Problems” that actually there are three participants shaping any utterance, first the speaker (what the speaker wants to say), and the listener (what kind of response the listener is expected to have) and then also a superadressee (sort of the ideal listener, somebody who will REALLY understand us). I don’t think this idea is so clear in “Speech Genres,” or maybe it’s something that Bakhtin thought of later, I don’t know. Anyway, Bakhtin’s argument about who participates in the utterance reminded me about one of the criticisms we had about Wenger’s book, that he was obviously arguing against somebody, some established way of thinking (or actually more than one, I think) that he was challenging. It was difficult to understand Wenger because he did not make these explicit. In this case, I think it is the voice of the listener, not the ideal superaddresee but the real people that Wenger had read or talked with and disagreed with, that is the missing part of this utterance. I think it’s interesting to contrast Bakhtin’s linguistics with Saussurean linguistics, because it is exactly this kind of thinking that Bakhtin is talking back to (his listener, maybe). It is hard to imagine someone suggesting that during any speech act, the speaker has an infinite number of words at his disposal (well, at least a lot of words and a nearly infinite number of combinations). I mean it’s hard to imagine anybody explicitly saying that, but I can see how linguists sort of make this implicit assumption, even today. Bakhtin makes a lot more sense to me, and his suggestion that we are constrained by certain situations to produce our utterances within certain speech genres both makes sense and has practical implications for the world, even the classroom. I think immediately of people who are not able to use the appropriate speech genres, or are at least are using speech genres other than the ones expected, for whatever reason. While Bakhtin doesn’t extend his reasoning into the realm of social politics or education, Wertsch does, and so I am planning to bring into class for my presentation some examples from Wertsch because he uses Bakhtin’s ideas to explain politics and classroom situations, which helps me understand these ideas. Probably we will move away from Bakhtin...but really my goal ultimately isn’t to understand Bakhtin, but to figure out how Bakhtin’s ideas can help me understand what I really care about in my own world. And, by the way, Bakhtin himself says this about authors, that the readers in a later age understand the author’s meaning better than the author did)...I hope Bakhtin doesn’t mind that everybody seems to be crazy about interpreting and reinterpreting him now.