Dialogue and Critique: Bakhtin and the Cultural Studies Writing Classroom

I began this essay by setting forth a problem that too often, I believe, accompanies a cultural studies approach to writing instruction-namely, the perception among students that cultural critique is a privileged, elitist mode of inquiry, one that is largely indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, those it presumably seeks to enlighten or liberate. I then argued that a dialogic, specifically Bakhtinian approach to response could help us address this problem, and offered a discussion of how two Bakhtinian concepts-anacrisis and the superaddressee-might be applied to our writing classrooms. Underlying what I have attempted here is my belief that cultural critique needs dialogue to restrain its tendencies for authoritarian pronouncements, for "last word" truisms and disabling certainties… . (Farmer 204).