For Tuesday's discussion of Bakhtin

Hello class. Sorry this is so late in coming, but I had a bit of a family emergency over the weekend and didn't have as much time to work on preparation as I would have liked. That said, I feel like I am fairly prepared now, and I want to post some questions here for our discussion of Bakhtin in Tuesday's class. We might not get to all of them, since I only have half an hour and plan to give a bit of a lecture about Bakhtin's life and such. Anyway, here they are:

Bakhtin says that our “‘creative individuality’ is nothing but the expression of a particular person’s basic, firmly grounded, and consistent line of social orientation” (1220). What would a believer say about this? A doubter? Are our utterances based on the society we are a part of? Why or why not? How does this relate to Burke’s “Terministic Screens”?

Bakhtin ends chapter 3 with a set of propositions. What do you make of these? Do you agree with them? Why or why not? What works and what doesn’t?

Bakhtin says that “the theme of an utterance itself is individual and unreproducible” (1224). Do you agree that no two utterances can have the same theme, the same meaning, even if they are identical in form and content based on the “historical situation” in which it is uttered?

Bakhtin says that “only active understanding can grasp a theme—a generative process can be grasped only with the aid of another generative process” (1226). Is actively thinking about a conversation really necessary? Does this mean that “multi-tasking” during a conversation means that you cannot truly understand its meaning? Does the speaker need to focus as intently as the listener; that is, does the speaker need to concentrate to really understand what he or she is saying and make sure that the intended message is going through?

Bakhtin says that the meanings of individual words do not matter, but the combination of those words, the social upbringing of the speaker and listener, and the “historical setting” of an utterance all combine to give an utterance meaning. Do you buy that? Why or why not? What would a believer say? A doubter?

Bakhtin says that “meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex” (1226). Does this mean that the listener has an equal share in the clarity of what the speaker is saying? How does this relate to the idea active understanding is necessary to “grasp a theme”?

If anyone would like to volunteer to act as a believer and/or doubter, I would love to include that in our discussion. There is also a possibility that I will divide the class into groups to perform the believer and doubter rolls, but I am not sure about that yet. We can discuss it a little bit tomorrow before I get into my short lecture.

I'm looking forward to a lively discussion of Bakhtin and his theories about language tomorrow, and I hope that you are, too!

See you then,

-Simon