Blackwell Reference Online

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The work of Mikhail Bakhtin has been ambivalently appropriated for the rhetorical tradition, despite Bakhtin's recurrent disparaging remarks about rhetoric. The range and power of his general theory of discourse have attracted rhetorical theorists to his work, even as the place of rhetoric in his work has put them on the defensive. His placement of rhetoric on the monologic side of his fundamental distinction between dialogic and monologic discourse has provoked Halasek (1998) to show that rhetoric is more dialogic than Bakhtin allows, Walzer (1997) and Murphy (2001) to reaffirm its essential monologism, and Dentith (1997) to deny the distinction between dialogic and monologic discourse altogether.This debate has addressed itself to a relatively small number of passages in which Bakhtin makes explicit pronouncements about “rhetoric” rather than to his discourse theory as a whole, where issues of concern to rhetoric arise without being named as such. And it has also answered his charges against rhetoric by mobilizing some commonplace version of the art against them, without acknowledging the variety of “rhetorics” on offer in the rhetorical tradition or situating Bakhtin among their authoritative expositors. The debate has established Bakhtin's pertinence to the rhetorical tradition, but it has not yet established his place within it or gauged the extent to which his admission to ... log in or subscribe to read full text