The following essay emerged from my oral exams in my PhD program.<\/p>\n
I did not find any articles relating to the pedagogy of preaching as it relates to Bakhtin.\u00a0 Stern (1995) reports that little has been written on the pedagogy of preaching under any category.\u00a0 In my experience, teachers of preaching are often selected because they happen to be good preachers in the pulpit.\u00a0 Often these professors have been trained in another field (e.g., communications, New Testament, Systematic Doctrine, etc.).\u00a0 The following essay relates an embryonic understanding of Bakhtin.\u00a0 Much of the discussion is the third part of Question 3.\u00a0 I offer these utterances as a beginning of a grounded theory that will set a conceptual framework for future reflection and research.<\/p>\n
Bakhtin lived his life in opposition to the notion of a single truth.\u00a0 He employs dialogue as a key to understanding our world.\u00a0 Everyone is engaged in a dialogue with the voices of the past and the voices of the future.\u00a0 Clark & Holquist (1984) demonstrate how this dialogic concept has been adopted by many ideologies and perspectives.\u00a0 Bakhtin has become the endorser, father, and advocate of various competing and contrary ideologies.<\/p>\n
Language is not understood in a general, singular or unitary sense; it is always defined in terms of diversity and change-ability: languages, multiple voices, heteroglossia.\u00a0 Language is never unity, says Bakhtin; actual social life and historical becoming create a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbalideological and social belief systems (Casey, 1993).<\/p>\n
The plurality of social situations creates a multiplicity of languages.\u00a0 Like society, a language is stratified not only into dialects in the strict sense of the word, but also into professions or generations.\u00a0 This stratification and diversity of speech will spread wider and penetrate to even deeper levels as long as a language is alive and still in the process of becoming.<\/p>\n
The meaning of meaning finds many definitions.\u00a0 Some desire to locate meaning in the author and authorial intent (Hirsch, 1967).\u00a0 Others choose different paths such as deconstruction or reader response where meaning is located in the reader.\u00a0 Some choose middle ground in the text.\u00a0 Bakhtin engages all these paths at different points desiring to have a conversation.\u00a0 He gives primacy of the utterance in context and focuses on the intentional negotiation of meaning and interpretation between author and reader.\u00a0 For Bakhtin, criticism must maintain that the meaning of literary works depends on the historical situation of the text, the social situation of the reader, and the complex interaction generated by the act of reading (Bizzell & Herzberg, 1990).\u00a0 These authors suggest that dialogue is the \u201creal\u201d location of meaning for Bakhtin.\u00a0 Although Bakhtin places great emphasis on linguistic meaning as the sphere of our existence, I wonder about the use of the word \u201creal\u201d in Bakhtin\u2019s vocabulary.\u00a0 Bakhtin mediates the formal restriction of language with the freedom and openness found in the context of communication.\u00a0 Therefore, Bakhtin recognizes the speaker\u2019s or writer\u2019s rhetorical intention to move the audience to action while maintaining the audience\u2019s active role in interpreting utterances in order to reply.\u00a0 This interchange is seen in the speaker\u2019s or writer\u2019s awareness of the audience\u2019s role in reading or hearing.<\/p>\n
There are no isolated individuals, for the continual constitution and reconstitution of any world-view is inextricably bound up with its relationship to other world-views, (in a system of intertextuality); all language is essentially social.\u00a0 Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived in its socially charged life.\u201d\u00a0 The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue.\u00a0 Must understand texts in terms of their immediate context.\u00a0 No utterance in general can be attributed to the speaker exclusively; it is the product of the interactions of the interlocution, and broadly speaking, the product of the whole complex social situation in which it occurred.\u00a0\u00a0 Within such a community there are words only known to those who belong to the same social horizon and are termed, \u201cpasswords.\u201d\u00a0 Passwords are common verbal patterns within narratives of each particular social group (Casey, 1994).<\/p>\n
Intersections of discourses occur between differing interpretive communities.\u00a0 Bakhtin calls this a social dialect (Popular Memory Group\u00begeneral cultural repertoire; West\u00bediscourse; Gramsci\u00becollective subjective; Fish\u00beinterpretive community).\u00a0 In his relational analysis, however, while various social discourses have areas of divergence, they do not exclude, but rather intersect with each other, as they encounter each other in small and larger scale social interactions, and as they struggle over meaning (Casey, 1996).<\/p>\n
Ugolnik (1990) states the multiple layers of the discourse found in the novel is also found in narratives.\u00a0 \u201cIn the cacophony and intersection of voices is the raw material of the artist.\u00a0 The diglossia or \u2018man-languaged\u2019 nature of humanity, is the medium of the artist in modernity out of our multiple pluralism, the novelist draws voices and enlists them in the act of dialogic \u2018becoming\u2019\u201d (143).\u00a0 See intertextuality in question 4.<\/p>\n
Those disempowered people in society have a language and a voice that is often silenced by the elite.\u00a0 This group needs to have a voice for their perspective is essential for us to have an awareness of reality.\u00a0 They are equal speakers and interpreters alongside the dominate culture. \u00a0\u00a0The ruling class has a vested interest in maintaining univocity and the appearance of univocity as a naturally occurring phenomenon.\u00a0 Struggles between two or more social languages are often muted, obscured, or even censored.\u00a0 Casaregola and Farrar (1996) emphasize the social implications and moral consequences of all discourse in Bakhtin\u2019s perspective.\u00a0 Bakhtin encourages the one who utters to take responsibility for the utterance as it engages a context in dialogue.\u00a0 This perspective gives rise to using Bakhtin in the sphere of Christian ethics (seen below).<\/p>\n
Lindsey (1993) connects Bakhtin to Liberation Theology.\u00a0 The carnival of words serves as a social critical voice to turn the dominant religious discourse upside down.\u00a0 He notes that not every discourse is equal, but every view does have a point of view.\u00a0 Just because one voice is louder, does not mean it needs to be heard above others.<\/p>\n
Language in the ordinary dialogue of the day is overpopulated with the intentions of others, expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one\u2019s own intentions and accents is a difficult and complicated process.\u00a0 Dominate culture steals words and uses them for their own devices\u00be a co-opting language (Casey, 1994).\u00a0 Bakhtin uses the word \u201ccarnival\u201d to characterize the reversal that language can create in the world.\u00a0 Meaning can be turned on its head by polyphony.\u00a0 This will be illustrated below in the African American use of signifying.\u00a0\u00a0 Carnival is the dynamic of the unpredictable way an utterance interacts with readers.\u00a0 The social carnival surrounding textual reception must be part of the interpretive act.\u00a0 The upheaval occurs due to the heteroglossic nature of the text and the phenomenon that readers are constructed out of many contending and overlapping communities of belief, education, politics, occupations, etc.<\/p>\n
Bakhtin\u2019s prosaics focuses on the chaos of life and the appreciation of disorder.\u00a0 Bakhtin was suspicious of systems that would impose hierarchy and organizational order.\u00a0 Totalitarian systems monologically endeavored to organize and explain reality by one system.\u00a0 Bizzell & Herzberg (1990) contend that since Hegel, influential theological and philosophical schemas have tried to create unity, universality, and identity.\u00a0 Plurality and difference was considered second class.\u00a0 Bakhtin, however, desired to mediate otherness and difference through the act of dialogue.\u00a0 Bakhtin explored the territory between addresser and addressee.\u00a0 An example of this latter mediation is seen in Ugolnik (1984) where the author confesses his own alienation toward orthodox religion and his attraction to Marxism.\u00a0 He uses Bakhtin to mediate Christianity and Marxism.\u00a0 He states that wholeness in incomplete in the self.\u00a0 Dialogue creates the dynamic of belonging and community which can be realized on a global scale.<\/p>\n
There is no closure nor a first word or a last word in dialogue.\u00a0 Even meanings in dialogues of the remotest past will never be finally grasped once and for all, for they will always be renewed in later dialogue.\u00a0 Subsequently, there is no closure in the past or the future.\u00a0 Monologue, on the other hand, is bi-modal.\u00a0 Everything is right or wrong, left or right, innocent or guilty.\u00a0 The destruction of the opponent becomes the task of monologue.\u00a0 A singular voice will reflect the ideology of the individual or society.\u00a0 The speaker and the text are found in isolation.\u00a0 Meaning is found in an independent system.\u00a0 Utterances are pure symbols simply reflecting something else (Bizzell & Herzberg, 1990).\u00a0 Dialogue honors the other. \u00a0Destruction of the opponent will also destroy the place where the word lives.\u00a0 Multiple voices need to be heard.\u00a0 We can only live and grow as we learn to listen to diverse voices and to engage in discourse with others.\u00a0 Our purpose is not to control or conquer but to engage in joint inquiry.\u00a0 Diverse and competing voices engaging in a polyphonic dialogue will form a complex yet growing community.<\/p>\n
There has been much written on Bakhtin\u2019s connections with the Russian Orthodox Church, Christianity, and God (Bizzell & Herzberg, 1990; Emerson, 1990; Morson & Emerson, 1990; Clark & Holquist, 1984; Lock, 1991; Lindsey, 1993).\u00a0 Uglnik (1990) argues forcefully that all of Bakhtin can be understood in terms of his Christian faith.\u00a0 Another example of an ideology drafting Bakhtin to serve personal aims.\u00a0 Lindsey cautions readers of seeing too much in the connections made about Bakhtin and religion because so many see Bakhtin only through their own personal lens.<\/p>\n
Ugolnik notes, \u201chow crucial the silences are in our lives\u00behow crucial the censor and the lapses and to the meaning that emerges.\u00a0 Bakhtin\u2019s early discourse was explicitly Christian in it terms, unabashedly theological in its assertions\u201d (135).\u00a0 He contends the silences in Bakhtin\u2019s later career are due to the dominant discourse prevalent in Russia at the time.\u00a0 Therefore, Bakhtin exiled God from his discourse, becoming secular in his writings, ever realizing God cannot be so easily suppressed.<\/p>\n
The primary connection for Uglnik between Bakhtin and Christian discourse is found in Russian liturgy.\u00a0 At the heart of this liturgy is a communal language that has always been opposed to the privatization and individuation of religion.\u00a0 The communal language can be illustrated by the relational aspect of the trinity that becomes a model of the self that is not autonomous.\u00a0 Consciousness should be seen as a social phenomenon that takes shape and being in the material of signs created by an organized group in the process of social intercourse.\u00a0 In the past, the Russian formalists had sought for the uniqueness of insight of the author of a text.\u00a0\u00a0 They desired to isolate the text from context.\u00a0 They separated literary language from ordinary language.\u00a0 However, Bakhtin finds meaning as a process that is perpetually in a state of becoming.\u00a0 Meaning does not find full realization in the text nor outside the text.\u00a0 Closure does not come at the beginning nor the end.\u00a0 Also the text is not self-contained in the reader.\u00a0 Dialogue is a continuing process.\u00a0 When dialogue ceases, so too existence.\u00a0 Bakhtin argues for a plurality of voices that continually shape and alter the perception of others.\u00a0 Language can only be understood as dialogue.\u00a0 Structural linguistics and literary stylistics fail to account for the roles of intention, interpretation, context, etc. in the creation of meaning (Bizzell & Herzberg, 1990).<\/p>\n
Examples of using Bakhtin in biblical studies:<\/strong><\/p>\n It was just a matter of time before Bakhtin\u2019s theories would be applied to the Bible.\u00a0 Bakhtin is primarily used in biblical studies as just one more source for a hermeneutical tool.\u00a0 The most comprehensive text to date is Reed\u2019s text which follows the shift from poetry to narrative in literary studies of the Bible.\u00a0 The traditional narrative research emphasized a univocal structure in the text.\u00a0 A single authorial consciousness presided over the text with specific purpose and intent.\u00a0 Each passage contained a plot with a definite beginning, middle, and end (rooted in Phaedrus<\/span> where Socrates calls for closure at both ends of the time continuum).\u00a0 The text also will contain characters whose individual fates, whether realistic or symbolic, are freely chosen or predetermined, and are primary determinants of the action of the text as a whole.\u00a0 McCracken (1993) finds the key of dialogism in what happens between characters.\u00a0 Often, the action is unresolved and the reader does not find closure in the text.<\/p>\n Consequently, Reed can be seen as a mediator between the fragmentary approaches of the historical method and the thematizing of the theological approach.\u00a0 Reed interrogates both tendencies.\u00a0 The centrifugal tendencies (univocal) of historical analysis disseminates meaning outward into a multiplicity of isolated centers.\u00a0 The centripetal tendencies (polyvocal) of theological interpretation seeks to bring unity of voice and theme by gathering meaning into a univocal core even when difference is damaged by exposing a single more powerful and louder voice.\u00a0 Bakhtin sees these tendencies in all texts (the tension between unity and diversity).<\/p>\n Reed proposes to utilize Bakhtin\u2019s dialogic techniques to see familiar stories from another perspective.\u00a0\u00a0 The Bible is seen as a variety of dialogues formally encoded in the scriptures in a canonical state.\u00a0 Previously, opposing monologic forces were one-sided and incapable of grasping the radically dialogic nature of all human utterance.\u00a0 These past methods of interpretation created opposing traditional approaches to interpretation.\u00a0 Accepting Bakhtin\u2019s dialogue as a linguistic precondition of all communication, Reed demonstrates that there is a dialogue between stories rather than any archetype narrative structure.\u00a0 He contends the heterogeneous textuality of the different genre forms in the Bible is better served by a model of dialogue or story and counter-story.\u00a0\u00a0 Therefore, the Bible provides an example of the way discourse arises and takes its meaning from the intersecting of contextual and linguistic boundaries.<\/p>\n Bakhtin\u2019s approach negotiates between unity and multiplicity.\u00a0 Reed discerns that throughout the Bible there are recurrent forms and coherent patterns in conversations between God and his people.<\/p>\n Reed\u2019s approach provides a reader of the Bible with several advantages.\u00a0 To see the different voices in the text as a symptom of struggles acted out within the text brings new perspectives to age old questions.\u00a0 When the interpreter acknowledges different historical layers, different voices, the living tradition of the canon becomes apparent.\u00a0 Stories are retold, reframed, and redeployed.\u00a0\u00a0 Different layers of tradition are dialogic revoicing of the present concerns of the people of God.\u00a0 Stories are repeated, but with a difference.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Therefore, Reed brings the entire Bible under the umbrella of God having a dialogue with his people.<\/p>\n Reed uses the stories of Abraham and Isaac as a point of comparison with Ishmael.\u00a0 Both stories speak of sacrificing a son.\u00a0 How do these stories, often taken in isolation, engage each other in dialogue.\u00a0 The approach of dialogue between stories sets Reed\u2019s approach apart from the narrative criticism that insists on a univocal structure.\u00a0 Therefore, by juxtaposition of story with story provides new insights.\u00a0 Other chapters deal with the primeval prologue, Gospels, law, prophesy, wisdom, Job, and Revelation.<\/p>\n Polzin (1984) and Levine (1992) do similar type hermeneutical analysis of Psalms and 1 Samuel respectively.<\/p>\n Bakhtin is also used in Christian ethics.\u00a0 An example of this category is clearly seen in Cartwright\u2019s work (1992).\u00a0 Cartwright identifies two approaches to ethics: formalists and particularists.\u00a0 He contends that both approaches are unable to address the questions of historical interpretation and modern culture as they relate to ideology.\u00a0 Bakhtin\u2019s dialogic methods provides Cartwright with a framework to mediate these positions.<\/p>\n Peterson (1993) explores the double voicedness of Black American writing and demonstrates how the utterances of this cultural group exhibits Bakhtin\u2019s dialogic framework.\u00a0 Language, discourses, and narratives are culturally produced.\u00a0 Many voices share together a common story of a people.\u00a0 Furthermore, the story is contextually interpreted by community.\u00a0 Meaning can neither be created, understood, or presented except within community.\u00a0 L. Gates is the primary example of Peterson.<\/p>\n Hale (1994) uses DuBois as an example of dialogic discourse in the African American setting.\u00a0 He maintains you cannot abstract language from the social matrix that produced the utterance.\u00a0 Language exhibits a double consciousness that is socially constructed.\u00a0 Bakhtin parallels a social constructionist view where knowledge is socially constructed.\u00a0 Discourse communities (e.g., African Americans) will, in Bakhtin\u2019s sphere, construct a reality and knowledge system that is their own.\u00a0 Groups will draw upon the linguistic resources available with their culture in order to constitute localized realities.\u00a0 Because all discourse is rhetorical in nature, the way we validate statements is in the persuasiveness of statements within a particular community (opposed to individuals who claim to encounter the world directly and use language to describe their encounter).\u00a0 Therefore, reality is not seen in the correspondence of ideas to objects and events or in the faculties of the mind or in some set of natural laws.\u00a0 Plato attacked the sophists for similar views.\u00a0 The language also displays a socialized ambivalence as it is employed.\u00a0 Connections are made by Hale to Bakhtin in understanding Black identity as determined by social identity.\u00a0 Knowledge, therefore, is intersubjective (contra Aristotle).<\/p>\n Both Hale and Peterson can serve as conceptual frameworks for my dissertation.\u00a0 I am desiring to explore the pedagogy of preaching among African Americans.\u00a0 Although these articles did not directly address preaching, their contribution to an emerging theory is valuable.\u00a0 I would suggest that a possible direction is to see how the black community understands preaching as an utterance of the community and not the individual.\u00a0 Preaching the shared story by saying what others have said, will say, or wish they could say.<\/p>\n Although I discovered other articles that indirectly related Bakhtin to religious studies, none directly addressed preaching.\u00a0 There were articles that addressed the pedagogy of Bakhtin which I included in the discussion of question 2.\u00a0 Again, these articles on pedagogy suggest possible frames for an emerging theory that could be overheard in my dissertation.<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n Bizzell, P. & Herzberg, B.\u00a0 (1990).\u00a0 The rhetorical tradition: Readings from classical times to the present<\/span>.\u00a0 Boston: Bedford Books.<\/p>\n Cartwright, M. G.\u00a0 (1992).\u00a0 The uses of Scripture in Christian ethics\u00beafter Bakhtin.\u00a0 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics<\/span>.\u00a0 Washington: Georgetown University Press.<\/p>\n Casey, K.\u00a0 (1993).\u00a0 I answer with my life: Life histories of women teachers working for social change<\/span>.\u00a0 New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n Casey, K.\u00a0 (1996).\u00a0 Class notes.<\/p>\n Clark, K. & Holquist, M.\u00a0 (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin<\/span>.\u00a0 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n Emerson, C.\u00a0 (1990).\u00a0 Russian Orthodoxy and the early Bakhtin.\u00a0 Religion and Literature, 22,<\/span> 109-131.<\/p>\n Enos, T.\u00a0 (1996).\u00a0 Encyclopedia of rhetoric and composition: Communication from ancient times to the information age<\/span>.\u00a0 New York: Garland.<\/p>\n Hale, D. J.\u00a0 (1994).\u00a0 Bakhtin in African American literary theory.\u00a0 ELH, 61,<\/span> 445-471.<\/p>\n Hirsch, E. D. Jr. (1967).\u00a0 Validity in interpretation<\/span>. New Haven: Yale University Press.<\/p>\n Klancher, J.\u00a0 (1989).\u00a0 Bakhtin\u2019s rhetoric.\u00a0 In Reclaiming pedagogy: The rhetoric of the classroom<\/span>.\u00a0 Edited by P. Donahue.\u00a0 Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.<\/p>\n Levine, H.\u00a0 (1992).\u00a0 The dialogic discourse of Psalms.\u00a0 In Hermeneutics, the Bible and literary criticism.<\/span> Edited by A. Loades.<\/p>\n Lindsey, W. D.\u00a0 (1993).\u00a0 \u201cThe problem of great time\u201d: A Bakhtinian ethics of discourse.\u00a0 Journal of Religion, 73,<\/span> 311-328.<\/p>\n Lock, C.\u00a0 (1991).\u00a0 Carnival and incarnation: Bakhtin and orthodox theology.\u00a0 Literature and Theology, 5,<\/span> 68-82.<\/p>\n McCracken, D.\u00a0 (1993).\u00a0 Character in the boundary: Bakhtin\u2019s interdividuality in biblical narratives.\u00a0 Semeia, 63,<\/span> 29-42.<\/p>\n Morson, G. S. & Emerson, C.\u00a0 (1990).\u00a0 Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a prosaics<\/span>.\u00a0 Stanford: Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n Morson, G. S. & Emerson, C.\u00a0 (eds.).\u00a0 (1989).\u00a0 Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and challenges<\/span>.\u00a0 Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.<\/p>\n Peterson, D. E.\u00a0 (1993).\u00a0 Response and call? The African American dialogue with Bakhtin.\u00a0 American Literature, 65,<\/span> 761-775.<\/p>\n Polzin, R.\u00a0 (1985).\u00a0 The speaking person and his voice in 1 Samuel.\u00a0 Salamanca..<\/span> Edited by J. Emerton.<\/p>\n Reed, W. L.\u00a0 Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as literature according to Bakhtin.<\/span><\/p>\n Stern, R. (1995).\u00a0 The pedagogy of preaching.\u00a0 Concise encyclopedia of preaching<\/span>.\u00a0 Edited by W. H. Willimon & R. Lischer.\u00a0 Louisville: Westminster\/John Knox Press.<\/p>\n Ugolnik, A.\u00a0 (1984).\u00a0 The art of belonging.\u00a0 Religion and Intellectual Life, 1,<\/span> 113-127.<\/p>\n Ugolnik, A.\u00a0 (1990).\u00a0 Textual liturgics: Russian orthodoxy and recent literary criticism.\u00a0 Religion and Literature, 22, <\/span>133-154.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The following essay emerged from my oral exams in my PhD program. The Various Uses of Bakhtin\u2019s Theories in Contemporary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3578,"featured_media":0,"parent":8,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-61","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n