Bakhtin's Others and Writing as Bearing Witness to the Eloquent "I" Author(s): Chikako D.

Kumamoto Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Sep., 2002), pp. 66-87 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1512102 Accessed: 16/10/2009 09:19
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Chikako Kumamoto D.

Bakhtin's and Others Writing Bearing As Witness totheEloquent"l"

MikhailBakhtin'sdialogism and his irenic view of the culturalother inform this article that builds the multiple voice of the eloquent "I"as a dialectic self-construction where codes of meaning are inscribed. The eloquent "I"cultivates a deepened self-dialogue and offers students an epistemological and rhetorical discipline, bearing witness to their imaginative,meaningful interiorityand their written, public articulation of it.

In an interview he gave in 1959, Jean-Paul Sartre described what he considered the purposes of writing: Everyonewants to write because everyone has a need to be meaningful-to signify what they experience.Otherwise it all slips away... The cri ecrit-written cry-to use Cocteau'sphrase, only becomes an absolute when it is preserved in other people's memories, when it is integrated into the objectivespirit... every single person feels, perhaps only unconsciously, the need to be a witness of his time, of his life-before the eyes of all, to be a witness to himself. (30-32) While he speaks here as a literary man addressing a large, general audience, the richly suggestive terms he selects for what takes place in the production and aftermath of writing are potent: terms like meaningful, experience, written cry,people's memories, integrated, single person, need, and witness. None of CCC 54:1 / SEPTEMBER 2002 66

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or these words signals "ownership, connotation, and prejudice" "the hierarchy, in communalresponsibility" the act ofwriting (Newkirk106,92).ThoughSartre is awareof the social purposes and functions of writing achieved in dialogues between writers and readers,he speaks about writing primarilyas an existential and private urge for self-proof, a written signification of who or what one believes one is. He calls attention to the central role of self as the wellspringof writing and the purpose for such writing as an act of bearing "meaningful" witness to oneself. This last notion becomes particularlyilluminating when the term witnessis etymologicallyconsidered:it derivesfrom OldEnglishwitan (to know) and from Latin videreand Greekidein (to see), both in the physical and mental senses. Sartreintimates that before anything,before one'sbelonging in "adeterminate and codifiable social entity"such as "discoursecommunity,interpretivecommunity,speech community,and disciplinarycommunity:'1 writingbegins with and returnsto knowingand seeing the communityof oneoneself. Inhabiting such a community are both an implied writer and an implied reader within oneself who are retrieved from lived experiences and broughtinto being duringone'sact of writing.Thus, Sartreprovokesattention to the notion of self as a dialectic site within which personal codes for the production of meaning arediscoverable,and writingbecomes the highest form of witness to one'smeaningful self. At the risk of betraying an identity crisis as a writing teacher trained in literature,I plunge into Sartre'sthoughts because he recovers for me the notion of self as the source and agency of cognitive and critical work and persuades me to rethink it in a more liberatingway when I think about students as writing selves and about the writings they produce. I admit that, like any other critical term, the notion of self challenges our readydefinitionaleffortto arrest and stabilize flux in its preconceived understandings,but it metamorphoses into spheres that are alien to its own. Indeed,I tread upon this slippery territory of self while casting a respectful backwardglance at a long line of humanists universalizingand culturalistsparticularizingthe readingof self in the West:behind Descartes, Kant,and Hume stands the romantic tradition of self as the unitary "I," self being an essence, coherent, autonomous, fixed, this unified,and normativestandard;and behind the women'smovement and feminist philosophy and politics has emerged the gendered self-one's core being as either male or female-particularly, the identity of women as the less-valued other,shaped by political forces and affected by public systems of control. More recently,there is the ethnocentrist claim that who or what one is can be determined by or is relative to the ethnographic community into which one

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fits. Clifford and havedemonstrated Clifford, otherethnographers Geertz,James that this view of self (anotherperception of the other) tends to valorizethe self of the West over the self of the rest of the world.2 Faced with such colliding ideas of self, even David Hume found the definition intractable: in It is certainthatthereis no question philosophy moreabstruse thanthatconand of whichconstitutes pera cerning identity, the nature the uniting principle, son.So farfrombeingableby oursensesmerely determine question, to this we to to givea satisfactory anmusthaverecourse the mostprofound metaphysics swerto it;andin common it is evident life theseideasof selfandpersonarenever (240) veryfixedor determinate. Edward Said has translated Hume's epistemological distress in our century'scosmopolitical context when he characterizesthe past discourse of self as one that tends to create "asingle overmasteringidentity" (16). He is particularlytroubledby such discourse because it tends to impede "atrue enlargementof the mind"and because it inevitablyresultsin the suffocating"normative self-I/deviant other"dualism and its cognates, like mind/body,nature/ savagery,male/female, reason/passion, order/disorder,culture/multiculture, or majority/minority, insiders/outsider(16-17). Whateveroppositionalexpressions it may have adopted, the discourse of self in the past, Said cautions us, promotes the partial, bifurcated way of knowing, oblivious to the existential proof that a person does not remain ontologically and epistemologically one kind of self forever.For Said'sreformedliberalism,the self must take genesis from "alarge and generous view of human diversity"(15), a critical position sympathetically echoed in Stephen Greenblatt'sliberating discourse on self and culture in his theory of "self-fashioning." According to Greenblatt,one's self means "asense of personal order,a characteristicmode of address to the world"born of "anincreased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable,artfulprocess"(2,257). Therefore,as Said might agree, one's "personalorder"is to be measured neither by the humanist universality of normative man (woman? person?) nor by the culturalist exceptionality of national,gender,sexual, or ethnic markerslike a Westernself or (in modern usage) multicultural self. Rather,it is to be impelled toward a new heterogeneous synthesis where one's specificity and difference are accepted and where this acceptance leads to the reclaimed cognizance of a universal self, endowed with "thepower of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referringthem severallyto their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence"

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(Newman 99). In her study of self and style in seventeenth-century English prose, Joan Webberidentifies this emerging new universal self with a special formof the writer'sself-consciousness,driventowardidealismyet foreverearthon bound: "meditative,anti-historical,'and "symbolic" one hand, but "active, timebound,"social, linear,and logical on the other.Herevocativepen calls this desirable fusion of the universal and the concrete self in a person, "The Eloquent 'I"'(7,8, 256).3 For my present essay, then, Said, Greenblatt,and Webberundergirdmy belief that the writing self must be reclaimed as a universalcomplexity of human mind with its capacities for change, abunThe self be as writing must reclaimed dance, fusion, unity,creativity,and certainty-for ofhuman mind all writers, not just for those others whose self, a universal complexity its for unlike a non-Europeanself, may not have histori- with capacitieschange, cally receivedits due respect.I furtherwish to sub- abundance, unity, fusion, creativity, mit that my version of the eloquent "I"is a writer and all not certainty-for writers, just who is more self-reckoning, more inward, more for those others whose unlike a self, knowing and who accomplishes writing "at a non-European not have self, may higher dimensionality[in our mind's]landscapereceiveddue historically its respect. neither homogeneous nor divided, spacious enough to enable multiplicity to survive without degenerating into opposition"(Keller48). In orderto shape my sense of this new universalwriting selfethics of"otherness" my eloquent "I"-I reconfigureMikhailBakhtin's ("finding oneself outside")and his dialogic-promptedway of knowing4and argue that, inscribed with multiple and various others occupying the self, my eloquent "I" is a written witness to personalorderwhose ordinancederivesfrom a variorum of a writer'sprincipled interiority.

Approachingthe eloquent "I"

MikhailBakhtininvokes a symbolic writerlyself similar to the eloquent "I"as a category of epistemological and rhetoricalpossibility when he explains his ethics of'butsidedness" in his 1970 essay titled, "Responseto a Question from the NovyMir EditorialStaff":
There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy,idea that in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one'sown, and view the worldthroughthe eyes of this foreignculture... Ofcourse, a certain entry as a living being into a foreign culture,the possibility of seeing the world through its eyes, is a necessarypart of the process of understandingit; but if this were the only aspect of this understanding,it would merelybe duplication

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not renounce and itself,its ownplacein time,its ownculture; it forgets nothing. In orderto understand, is immensely it for important the personwho understandsto be locatedoutside objectof his or hercreative the understanding-in For see and time,in space,in culture. one cannotevenreally one'sownexterior it or can comprehend as a whole,andno mirrors photographs help;ourrealexteriorcan be seen andunderstood by otherpeople,becausetheyarelocated only outsideus in spaceandbecausetheyareothers. Inthe realmof culture, outsideness a mostpowerful is factorin understandculture foreign that culture reveals itselffully ing.It is onlyin the eyesof another that andprofoundly not maximally becausetherewillbe cultures see (but fully, even andunderstand more). (6-7) This passage crystallizes Bakhtin'sanalysis of what it means for us to be "located outside"-our outsidedness. What entails in being located outside is our relationbetween our own culture and other cultures that are foreignto ours in space and time. When we are located outside, Bakhtin suggests that we penetrate and experience other autonomous cultural entities-whether peoples, languages, discourses, thoughts, or objects-as deeply as possible. But having done this without forgetting other cultures, we need to return to the "understanding"provided to us by one'sown self or one'shome culture. Because we maintain our identities as well as theirs in a new enriching synthesis, we "engage in a kind of dialogue,which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particularmeanings,these culfor present is tures"(7). 'A meaning only reveals its The of passage my essay appeal this that is view but manifold, thefirst his ofothers is depths"in the process of our cultural the able jettison customarily to transgressive, bonding, which, in turn, results in our ofone's connotations outsidedness- acquiringa heightened"creative undernegative of cultural others and ouroutsiders inour (or, contemporary standing" equivalent,"the it able cultural others")-and toinstallina selves (7). and knowing.5 The appeal of this passage for my status positive ofbeing for present essay is manifold,but the first is his view of others that is able to jettison the customarilytransgressive,negative connotations of one's outsidedness-outsiders (or,in our contemporary equivalent,"the cultural others")-and able to install it in a positive status of being and for knowing.5And this central premise is the metaphoric spine on which the core of my teaching composition is supported.As a teacher teaching writing at a community college where so-called multiculturalstudent writto ers are yearly increasing, I am "listening to the world"6 learn and imagine

and would not entail anything new or be enriching.Creativeunderstandingdoes

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these students' vastly different contexts of knowledge and being. For me, Bakhtin'sstance that we are all unique but are never alone is exhilaratingand emancipatory-both personally and intellectually. Viewed under Bakhtin's premise of others, instead of remaining merely ethnic or racial others to be overcome as obstacles or as uninterested aliens, my multicultural students can provoke us to articulate our own views on our selves and our society as well as on theirs. Bakhtin muses on scientific trends as an example of how consciousnesses interact: "The more demarcation the better, but benevolent demarcation.Without border disputes. Cooperation.The existence of border zones (new trends and disciplines usually originate in them)" ("Notes"13637). Bakhtinrecognizes that culturaloutsiders exercise a special mental sight from the outside through which they can "see" what the insiders cannot. Conversely,by defining oneself more sharply against what is foreign, one can be led to a deepening understanding of one's "native" self. The attractiveness of Bakhtin'sepistemology of culturalothers is the others'abilities to obtain what Tzvetan Todorovnames "epistemologicalprivilege," where their minds move transformativelytoward epiphanic moments of creative knowing and understanding.7 In his disagreement with the notion of self pursued in expressivistwriting,James Berlinclaimed, "... the student's 'true'self is subtly constructed by the responses of others in the class. The subject formation the student 'finds' in the act of self-investigation and freely chooses as his or her 'best' self is finally a construction of the classroom experience"(179). If he is right, then it seems more urgent to me that students in the composition class begin with the right idea of difference:not the collective, superficial difference among their classmates but the differences born of rigorous knowing of oneself marked by what RichardRodriguez calls "anattitude of mind,my imaginationof myself"(138).FollowingBakhtin's expansiveand most idealistic conception of others, ratherthan questioning the meaning and truth of what they write only because they have come as "citizen[s]of somewhere else"(Hawthorne74), my multiculturalstudents, writing in an American academic environ, can, therefore, possess a sense of themselves as meaningful people and as epistemologically free and morally responsible agents. All my students may then be able to see each other with a Bakhtinianwriter's"higher and freerdegree of answerability" the end (Emerson209). In turn, I as their in teacher can avoid "the teachers' unstated cultural definitions of the self" (Faigley 410).8Instead, I may have a chance to practice my irenic pedagogy

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born of soteriological sympathies and educated civility in order to create a classroom where the influence of a responsive understandingamong my students will pervade.9 Forme, then, Bakhtin's "creative of understanding" others gives me a start to shape my sense of a writing self to be a fruitfuldialogic interaction among differentmodes of self made possible through a cognitive transformativeability of the mind. A self's encounter with cultural others is essentially dialogic because a way of knowing one'sself involves a way of conceiving of the others. A corollaryis that there exists a continuous interchangeof meanings shaping the self. Bakhtin explains the formation of this "inwardlyperceived"epistemological self through the "spatialform"of the self's relationship to the outer world in 'Author and Hero"and "Discoursein the Novel."The self stands in three "double-voicedness" 354). The first is the "I-forpositions ("Discourse" 24), myself position ("Author" which means how my inner makeup or possias cultural, sexual, intellectual, and moral thoughts, ideals, bility-such attitudes, values, preferences,and the like-looks and feels to my own cognition. Then there is the second position, "Iandthe other"(23), which relates my self to outsiders in ways my self looks to those outside of it: "myprojecting myself into him and experiencing his life from within him... -come to see and to know-what he experiences"(25). The last position is the "other-forme":"eitheras my own lived experience or as the lived experience of this particular and unique otherhuman being"(23), a way of the others seeing my self, and my self theirs. Duringthis complicated movement from relatingthe self to the other and back to the self, Bakhtin believes that the other surmounts its sense of being an outsider but is affirmedas "someoneelse's'I"'and becomes another subject (qtd. in Dentith 43); as a result, the other would be known as another self to the original self doing the knowing. Placed in our contempois becomes an epistemological self when "I" part of"Berarycritical terms, "I" a mental act of "participationin bridged by intersubjectivity, ing-for-Others:' focused only on one's subjecshared meanings"that reconciles a "solipsism" tivism and the more sophisticated awareness of one's relationshipswith others (Kinneavy 399; Brummett 30-31). Knowing oneself and others takes competing epistemolobringingtogetherand reconcilingmanyintrapersonally gies. Bakhtinseems to have anticipated a development of an intersubjectively knowing self whose action also gestures toward Donna Qualley'sdefinition of reflexivitythat echoes Bakhtin'sdirectionality:"Byreflexive,I mean the act of turning back to discover,examine, and critique one'sclaims and assumptions in responseto an encounterwith anotheridea,text,person,or culture" (Turns3).

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What Qualley, and Kinneavy, Brummettaccomplishis their cross-epochal clarificationof the heart of Bakhtiniandialogic epistemology:one obtains selfknowledge by evolving from being I-monologic, "the false tendency toward reducingeverythingto a single consciousness,towarddissolvingin it the other's consciousness (while being understood):'to becoming an I-polyphonicbeing possessed with an "understandingas the transformation of the other's into one'sown/another's"' 141; ("Notes" "Methodology" 168).The dialogicselfknows an "internally discourse"that actively receives the meanpersuasive through ing of various others as discourse contexts causing one inner experience to interactwith other internalexperiencescontinuously("Discoursein the Novel" 345). To be correlatedwith other meanings means to be interanimatedwith a part of a new context, which, in turn, correlates with yet another, and so on. This is "actively responsive understanding"because the dialogic self must not only decode the other'smeaning but also actively grasp why it is being given, relate it to the self's own complex of inner contexts, evaluateit, and prepareits own response to the other ("Discoursein the Novel"296-97). The dialogic self "is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understandingthat... only duplicates his own idea in someone else's mind. Rather,he expects response, agreement, sympathy,obof 69). jection, execution, and so forth"("Problem Speech Genres" In this sense, the consciousness of the dialogic self, because it straddles various "border zones" of others' meaning "withoutborder disputes:' can become an epistemologicalsite of creativeunderstanding,ableto reveal"waysto mean"("Notes" 137;"Discoursein the Novel"346). ElsewhereacclaimingDostoevsky'spowerfuluse of polyphonyin his novels, Bakhtin further clarifies salutary effects of benefits from the reconceived notion of the other on one'sepistemological transformationand enrichment: Tobe meansto be fortheother, through foroneself. and Manhasno internal him, he on withinhimself, territory; is allandalways the boundary; sovereign looking I I withoutthe other; cannotbecomemyself withoutthe other; mustfindmyself in the other, the otherin me (in mutualreflection perception). and finding, (qtd. in Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin 96) HereBakhtinechoes his idea of"appropriation" languagewith which a writer of "populateswith his own intentions, his own accent... adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention"("Discoursein the Novel"293), while reminding us that we can never claim the totality of one's sense of self unless
he looks in the eye of the other or throughthe eyes of the other... I cannot do

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submitting to someone else's gaze, and that human knowledge depends on trusting the witness of others. It is a reasonableleap forwardfor me to imagine the eloquent "I"(as my sense of a writing self) taking genesis in the Bakhtinianparadoxicalinterplay of of self and other engaged in "theinner dialogism"("Problem the Text"119). An interiorized community of one, the An of the interiorized communityone, eloquent eloquent "I"is the self-other dualism

transformed a transformed a self-diversity into T"is the self-other dualism into wherein

and wherein synchronously exist synchronouslyand heterogeneously exist self-diversity

Conmultiple"I's." multiple"l's."meaning-inscribed meaning-inscribed heterogeneously
ceived in my faith in the mind'sinherently and transformativeabilities to absorb,integrate,combine, fuse, and cognitive is synthesize differentsources of knowledge,the eloquent "I" multidirectional the notion of the other and (to extend Bakhtin's term) and sees its self through discovers various others within. My argument here is that though the self has permeableego boundaries,each an epistemological agent in the sense of Wilrevisitswhat Lester Faigley I," liam Coles's"Plural my sense of the eloquent "I" describes as a coherent self, a "unified consciousness to be laid out on the and page"(qtd. in Newkirk21). Bakhtindepicts such an "encompassing" "emthat is, the witness and the judge of the wholehuman self as "supra-I, bracing" being, of the whole I, and consequently someone who is no longer the person, mainno longer the I, but the other ... a person irrespective of I and other," tained in a dialogic equilibrium("Author" "Notes"137-38). 39; "Multiaccentualized" social, biological, cultural, emotional, intellecby tual, or any other epistemological determinants, my eloquent "I"may be rephrased as a community of selection, connection, and interpretation, this community serving as a kind of sieve through which a writer'smind passes through before she knows her own language with which to create knowledge and her text. What the eloquent "I"creates is an inner discourse, observing a special psychic grammarpredicatedon the unique writerlyself-consciousness Bakhtin who may potentially become other "I's." made up by numerous "I's" describes such a discourse as "internaldiologization... interrelationshipof voices in discourse"(qtd. in Morris 110). Imagine, for example, a writer like this individual:a Japanesefemale who was brought up in a multideity society, educated in an Americanparochial system in Hiroshima,converted to Christianity in Japan,completed graduatework in Milwaukeeand Chicago,trained in Renaissancestudies, and, in the process, has been moving toward a synthesis aroundthe idea of a new ethical humanist teaching and writing about first-

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year English in DuPage County in Illinois. She has appeared as insiders, outsiders, and syntheses of both many times over, each self an opportunity for different types of knowing while demonstrating the necessity of each self to the other.The eloquent "I" thus carriesthe traces of a myriadother consciousnesses because a single consciousness cannot generate a sense of its self;only the awareness of another consciousness outside the self can produce that image. I am here referringto the internal processes of individual consciousness like Kathleen Blake Yancey's"multipleperspectives"(6) that reflect back to Bakhtin'sway of "bestow[ing]sense on me"in order to express "anessential, actual, once-occurrent,inescapable real Being"(Towarda Philosophy15-16). As such, the eloquent "I"is a discourse site of a writer'sepistemological ascent to reach a more richly achieved self-her sense of personal orderthrougha series of her highly self-awareencounters with powerfullypatterned culturescapes,each receptiveto criticalconnecisadiscourse ofa site eloquent"l" tions and resulting in a new knowledge of her- The writer's ascent reach a self. Thomas Newkirkmight not be adverse to epistemological to achieved self-hersense of me saying that this self has '"earned'... a mea- more richly sure of self-understanding and moral growth" personal aseries her of order-through self-aware encounters with (12-13). Becausethe writerhas dialogicallyhar- highly nessed different sources of knowledge in the powerfully each patterned culturescapes, awarenessof her others within, she acquiresditocritical connections and receptive verse cultures that she lacks and wishes to ina knowledge ofherself. resulting new complement and expand her self to build a richlyexpounded base of knowledge,fresh directions, and provocativepotentialities. A new synthetic individualself built upon a faith in transcending the external given, in entering a new field of possibilities, the eloquent "I"means and being manyplaces at once-to recast Qualley's thoughts on self-reflexivity "aspace for the development of a differentway of seeing"("BeingTwo Places" 36). Movingbeyond a binaryaccount of the self and committed to discovering multiple various writing others within as the act of knowing, the eloquent "I," in turn, forms a microcosm of multiple readersand writers contained within the self as the field of writing-distinct at given moments and from given perspectives but as seamlessly united as a whole (Urban49-50).10The primary harvest from such intertextualreadingof the self and its multiple others is the successive shaping of a new text. Writingthen becomes a written expression of the writing self tracing the whole network of textuality provided by polyphonic inner others. An outwardlyactualized text, as a result of "[d]ialectics ... born of dialogue... on a higherlevel,"(Bakhtin,"Methodology" 162) brings

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out the intricacies of the writer'sinteriorityand historicity and attests to her writing whose life springs from a variorum of her principled knowledge, thought, and imagination.

Lookingfor the eloquent "" in the writing classroom

I am now moved to describe what I gleaned from a small project.Three years in ago, I tried my embryonichypothesis about the eloquent "I" a class that was the first of three courses in my college'sone-year first-yearcomposition program.Callingon Bakhtin'sconcept of culturalothers from which a strategyto order a diversity within the self could be extrapolated, I tentatively hypothesized that fashioning an academic writing on concept Calling Bakhtin's ofculturalthrough multiple selves as connected knowothers whichstrategyorder ing might expand students' epistemological from a a to within be could extrapo-bases and creative self-literacies. What I diversity theself Itentatively that lated, hypothesized sought to discover included to what extent an fashioningacademic throughstudents' self-conscious cultivations of writing selves connected multiple as knowing might awareness about their potential various students' bases expand epistemological and forms of self could affect what they knew, what creative self-literacies. and how they could write about, and how their views of themselves would change. I wanted to investigate how students having a sense of Bakhtinian Namely, otherness in the course of writing might contribute to their criticaland cogniFor tive development and, in turn, to an improvement of their writing.1" the sakeof familiarity easy comprehension,mywritingpromptswereinformed and responsiveutterances of others. by identity-assumption as a form of Bakhtin's My basic premise was that in completing writing assignments, students were to envisionthemselvesin and enact recognizableroles suggestedinJackDodds's and Readers:A RhetoricalAnthology.I writing rubrics in his Rolesfor Writers selected five of his seven writing roles/identities in the following sequence: 1. Participant: students focus on self as a characterin a life experience story or in an essay;they focus on reflection and use emotional language. (27-31) 2. Reporter: students choose subjects from such models as a newspaper article or a reportedfact or custom; they focus on factual analysis and use informationallanguage. (95-100) 3. Teacher: students select a thing, person, or event to explain to a

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learning audience;they, in turn, learn to use informationaland explanatory language. (176-81) 4. Critic: students focus on subjects such as a cartoon, a movie or a TV show, a piece of music, or a drawing,or an essay; they critique and evaluate language that communicates judgments and ideas. (251-54) 5. Persuader: students choose some controversialtopics and a friendlyor antagonistic audience;they learn to use position-clarifyinglanguage that may make their audiences accept or oppose their positions.
(330-34)12

What I had hoped for from my student writers was an actualization of severalaspects of my hypothesis:a recurrentquestioning about the authenticity of their socially ascribed and/or self-awareidentities, a growing preoccupation with the nature of their "true"self, a fascination with the integrity of role-playing,a sharp focus on neglected or dormant or alternativeself-identia ties, an increased receptivityto the idea of "outsiders," confident use of rigorous reflection,an increasedskepticalanalysisof some of the accepted opinions, and an effort to make a cognitive leap made possible by virtue of deepening self-dialogue. Students also wrote journals in which they recorded two types thesis of identifiableselves. Based on my own subscription to Donald Murray's that all writing is autobiographicalin the sense that all writing comes from within, students first recordedtheir "realand everyday"selves, a form of selfintrospection emerging from their daily lives, physical events, thoughts, and emotions. Secondly, they wrote about their fictive "imaginaryor assumed" selves, a hybrid of creative writing, recording a variety of role enactments in their interior drama (Urban49). I sensed in their formal essays and their personal journals their delight and dismay as well as wonderment about the concept of self itself. I am not or quite certain if my students had developed a clear sense of their "true" central self within the short quarterperiod of three months or if they had become epistemologicallysurerbeings. Butwhat was gleanablefrom some of their formal essays and comments attached in end-of-quarterevaluationswas my tentative conclusion that students found certain selves/roles more comfortable to assume than others, a point that encouraged me to glimpse a Bakhtin-inI formed eloquent "I" emergingin their writing. Curiously, also found a strong overallpreference to adopt "that tone of lucid restraint that is the supposed ideal of scholarlyprose"as the quarterprogressed (Harris160). This last was

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evident as students navigated through various epistemological demands such as reflective response, empirical inquiry, objective analysis, cultural interrogation, logical thinking, and textual mediation of multiple positions. An examination of the sampling of the writings completed by two particular students, Kellyand Twisha,may reflect some of my provisionalclaims. Both were representativeof the community college students. Kelly,fresh out of high school, was preparingto transferto a four-yearinstitution (aftertesting herself at a community college) in orderto become a teacher.On the other hand, Twisha,a so-called multiculturaland bilingual student with some university experience in her home country,was sharpeningthat educational base to specialize in the computer field in an American educational environment. Likemany of their classmates, both students found the first identity of a participant congenial to simulate, mainly because in this particular assignment they could relate to the status of female students in higher education. Stronglycolored by their urgent concerns for their immediate futures and reflecting on their home-grown philosophies about intellectual and moral empowerment through education, their reflective responses to Adrienne Rich's an came across as an affirmationand a testament essay "Claiming Education" to their newly academic selves in the making. Moreover,moving across the as personal "I" writers and their awarenessof the generalizedidea of "student," as these students seemed instinctively relyingon Bakhtin's "I-for-myself" well as "I-the-other" steps of knowing, hinting at an awakening of double-voiced discourse. Prominentwas the placement of the autobiographical, knowing "I" at the center,which, however,was elevated at the end of their writings toward the context of the universalas they comparedtheir own experiences as female students to those of all female students. Twisha's writing particularlyshowed this style of knowing as her response spanned the personal and the objective easily: Thebest thingI likedaboutthis roleis thatshe [Rich] teacheswomenthatthey shouldpreserve theirself-dignity theirindividual and indiidentityas separate
vidualswith BRAINS. the Moreover, point of creatinga separatethinking and not on others has also impressed me a lot. I reallyloved this essay since it depending is a thought-provokingessay and is like a ray of enlightenment for the women living in this society... I personally believe that all women in the world should now be awakenedto get the light of education because it not only will help them to get an equal status as men but will also give them an inner mental satisfaction that they know about the world aroundthem and are not more ignorant... Lastly

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I wouldliketo addthateachandeverystudentshould"claim" "demand" i.e. edulife. cationto leada meaningful Kellyresponded equally,exhibiting a sense of epistemological conviction motivated by her awareness of others: "Idid like the comment that you must claim an education, not receive one. This is a very powerful statement that applies to life in many areas other than education. Claimingan education is important, and not just for women." Both students stronglyidentifiedwith the role of a teacheras well. Intriguingly,their identification derived not simply from assuming that role;instead, theirwritingindicateda degreeof a moreidentified theteacher not with role, merely complex awareness of identity assump- They someone tion. They identified with the teacher because liked idea helping they the of else learn todosomething also how but role, not merely because they liked the their selves be to idea of helping someone else learn how because believed present they to do something but also because they the fruitionsuch of helping from acts others in believed their present selves to be the thepast. to the Therefore, chose use they fruition of such helping acts from oththelanguage of language resembling closely ers in the past. Therefore,they chose to the"l-the-other" that particiintersubjectivity use the language closely resembling the in of desirable pated theshared meaningstheir language of the "I-the-other"intersub- or idealized ofa conceptionsteacher. jectivity that participated in the shared meaningsof theirdesirableor idealizedconceptions of a teacher.When Twisha reminisced about her former teacher in the course of role assumption, her memory acted as empirical evidence of her gaining a higher level of knowledge through assimilation of identity: WhenI was in highschool,I hadone of the most cherished in experiences my Mrs.Raywas explaining us the formation the class.Myteacher to of geography She the greatHimalayan ranges. showed squeezing of landandthe formation up of the mountains withthe helpof herhandkerchief. alsomadedrawings She to showthisprocess. wasveryillustrative expository. She and in Everyone the class was pleasedby the methodshe used to explainus ... [This]teacherstill has a effecton mymind... Thus,herintellectual of teaching lingering way helpedme in to develop creativity mythinking. Kelly,on the other hand, made a leap in self-knowing as she perceived her role as an intellectual and moral catalyst for those who would follow her teaching:"Tobe more specific, [my]role as a college professoris to give higher education to a group of potentially wonderful students in the hope that one

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day they will rise above their instructor in knowledge and experience." Their deepening dialogic ability and self-literacybecame even more evident in their assumption of the critic'srole in a special form of a thought synthesizer. Notable in their writing was the disappearance of first-person perspectives and the appearanceand prevalenceof those of the thirdperson. I surmised such stylistic shifts to be a manifestation of their efforts to shorten "the initial distance between their world views and the academic world view" by conforming to linguistic expectations of the academy (Bizzell 297). In so doing, they appeared to reflect Bakhtin's"the-other-for-me" epistemology in which they attempted to understandthe workingsof other people'sminds and, in turn, to know the workings of their own. In critiquing Plato, Neil Postman, and RichardRodriguez,Kellybeganwith a defense of her personalunderstanding of those writers, but she graduallytransformed it into a stance of a more acceptable discriminatingknower: It is crucial is. thatI beginwithwhattrueknowledge Thiswillgiveyoua better of of is. is knowledge understanding whatthemeaning thefollowing writing True intellectlearned fromexperience. is a self-truth is evidentonlyin a select It that I of This group thepopulation. is whatallthreeof the authors willdiscussbelieve to be the highestformof wisdom. onlythingtheydiffer is howtheyshed The on lighton the subject. In Twisha's writing,the personal had completely gone and was replacedwith a as formal,all-knowing"we" evidence of her new knowing self that was critiquof others:"Sofrom all these essays, we can conclude that knowling thoughts edge is vital in everyperson'slife because it is a base that strengthens a person's attitude and approachtoward life and it can be acquiredin differentways." The adoption of the pronoun "we" was her stylistic decision apparently to give her readers an impression of a more impersonal and impartial stance as a critic was expected to do. She seemed to believe that the use of the pronoun "we"expressed control and authority over her material and formed a Such a choice correspondedwith the gencounterpoint to heryet untested "I." eral sentiment of the class that they could play a critic about anything or anyone if they adopted a similar style. In the last role as a persuader,both students showed varying degrees of Bakhtin'sthree stances toward others. Their writing indicated their efforts to bridge the distance between a way of knowing through personal experience and the sharingof that experience,and a new way of knowing throughanalytical reasoning and dialectic argumentation.Indicativeof the change occurring

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in their grasp of self, their writing was accomplished in a mixture of personal reflection, informationalreportage,culturalinquiryand analysis,and synthesis of variousopinions and positions.This mixed style mixed could read a style be as could be read as a shift taking place in their self- This selftra- shift taking intheir place knowledgeas well as in their self-understanding, aswell selffrom their familiar,ordinaryselves to newly knowledge astheir versing constructed academic beings, which they could ar- understanding, from traversing ticulate in the persuasive language of their earned their selves familiar, ordinary to "personalorders." last essay was symptomTwisha's constructed academic newly beings, atic of all the changes taking place in her: which could inthe articulate I canstillrecall whenIleftIndia cameto America. and Theworldseemedto havechanged me.Although for in India hadreada lot abouttheadvancements I and newtechnologies America.wascompletely I of shocked whenI sawthisnewcounbecauseof the noteworthy tryforthe firsttime specially impactof materialism on thepeople... Looking alltheseaspects[ofmaterialism America], can at in we has on saythatmaterialism manynegative impacts thesociety... However, along with this, it also has somepositiveimpactsof its own.Peopletry theirbest to fulfill highgoalstheyhaveset upforthem,andtheirdesire achieve best the to the in life mayleadto manyinventions discoveries manyfieldsof life.Thus, and in materialism sometimes alsousefulforthe benefitsandgoodof mankind. is Kellysubmerged the personal completely as she argued for a calm, educated approach as the right way to solve the Y2Kproblem that was the topic of the time: Thewaytheproblem comesto a headcompletely relieson us,notjustasbusiness owners computer or buteveryone individuals. we eachdo our as If programmers, beforeit becomesmajor partto help solvethis problem widespread panic,the worldwillbenefitfrommanyangles. Thisis a problem maynot be as big as that therumors wouldsuggest, it willbecomethatbigifwe,aspeoplecaring but about the future ourcountry of theworld, of and don'ttakethetimeto realize probthe solutionto the Y2K lem,act uponit, andcomeupwitha creative bug. As the briefanalysismight suggest,in readingmy students'workand their responses at the time, I considered the papers a burgeoning sign of their epistemological, even ontological awareness.In the end, it was extremely intriguing to speculate that young students began to perceive,in assuming those five writing roles, the notion of the self or identity as something inconstant, shifting, and obscure. In turn, taking a role, supplanting it by others, and finally

they of earned persuasive languagetheir orders." "personal

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surpassingall roles except the one they preferredto play,their preferencescorresponded to the quality of writing they achieved. In so doing, however,the students, in fact, resonated back to In decisionsprefer their to roles certain toplay, Montaigne to whom essay writing meant thestudents seemed become that to aware the "aweighing" of issues at hand (from the to were impersonLatin exagium) and all that accrued from parts chose play not they ations ideals.Those were they its synonymous mental activities. And in but roles what not the to revealing somuch way their decisions to prefer certain roles to wished be, others seethem astheway play, the students seemed to become to but wanted they aware that the parts they chose to play to wanted seethemselves. they were not impersonationsbut ideals.Those roles were what they wished to be, revealingnot so much the way they wanted others to see them but as the way they wanted to see themselves. When they their preferredroles in writing, therefore,their writing did bear wit"essayed" ness to their ideal visions of themselves, their version of the eloquent "I."

Bearing witness to the eloquent ""

Recently,many distinguished compositionists have written about the question of the writing self and its relation to epistemology with great depth and theoretical innovations, a fact that vividlyattests to our fascination with and the importance of the subject. My essay has attempted to join in their diaas logue. In the final consideration,my eloquent "I" a pedagogic opening is all about the ever-shifting complexity and subtlety of today's culturescapes and felt respect and dignityfor individuals' sense of meaningfulbeing. In this sense, I strongly identify with Coles'soverallview of students'acts of writing: as Joseph Harris succinctly summarizes Coles for us, there should be something more existentially at stake for them than just completing classroom assignments for the sake of better transfer transcripts or other practical purposes. Thomas Newkirks defense of the moral aspect of the act of composing also deeply resonates with the teacher's soul in me. Theirs are philosophies that with which of "pedagogy possibility" permeateKayHalaseks Bakhtin-informed she reimagines "thewriting classroom as a dynamic site of education and intellectual challenge that recognizes both the constraints and possibilities of language in students' struggles to locate themselves in the university... and the beyond"(115). Similarly, equally Bakhtin-orientedChristianKnoellerendeavors to discover how students "drawon the voices from classroom talk" and how they "internalized,accommodated, and ultimately responded to the perspectives of classmates"(30, 61). My approachhas been to foregroundthe 82

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implications of the same set of Bakhtin'sterms in light of the self much more narrowlyturning inward.Of necessity, my image of the writing self stirs echoes and harmonies in Qualley'sreflexive turns, Halasek'sinteractivepossibility, Knoeller's"interactional" voicing of the participants, or Newkirk'sidea of writing as self-performance.Perhapsmine is retrogradein that it centers simply on the primacy of students' examined and tested self-knowing in the way Bakhtin describes the writer'screative imagination:"myselfI experiencefrom within myself"("Author" 28). Teaching composition to a diverse student body, I believe that the rich contribution of this internallyreclaimed self-construction in the writing process points to its opening up venues to a richer variety of connected thinking and knowing. As such, it should play an intimate role in the continuous turning and reifyingof students'criticalunderstandingsof themselvesand the world aroundthem;it should aid their enlightened and creativelearning.Formy part, the challenge will be to have students see themselves in an expansive freshness of the eloquent "I"-heterogeneity as empowerment as well as interdependence, connectedness, and commonality as virtues-more than they may have so far realized or believed. We are, after all, cultural and intellectual others, are we not? And this humble re-visioning of us elevates the discourse of the self as a consummating framework-an "architectonics" Bakhtinmight as nourish an imaginative yet disciplined subjectivity. As Micheal prefer-to Holquist and VadimLiapunovremind us in their introduction to Art and Answerability,Bakhtin, throughout his work, intimates that "to be human is to mean"and the "Humanbeing is the production of meaning... as the articulation of values"(xli). In this way,my thoughts circle back to Sartrewhen he has equated "meaningful" writing with the "criecrit."The final glory is that the cri ecrit so chronicled bears witness to the eloquent "I"because it gives a potent epistemological lesson with an ethical and intellectual splendor made even more luminous with its naturalaffinityto returnus to our reclaimedhumanist ethics in which one's authentic and unique heart and critical, creative mind are embraced and honored. Acknowledgments
I am deeplygrateful toJackDoddsfor his generouspermission (verbally given overthe to adopt and recast his classification of writers'roles in my class. I am also phone) thankfulto my students in thefall quarterof 1998for theirgenerous and willing comments (they permission (also verballygiven) toparaphrase the end-of-quarter I preferredto write them anonymously). also express my thanks to the two studentsfor

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writtenpermissions to be quoted in thispaper.For the shape of the introductorypartof my essay,I owe an intellectualdebt to EdwardSaid'sarticle, especiallypp. 14-15.

Notes
1. These expressionsare ThomasKent'sin his "Onthe VeryIdea of a Discourse In I this Community." this paper, wishto reconsider ideaof a discoursecommunity definednot as a "social but as an intenselyintrapersonal entity" communityconof manyfirst-person "I's." sisting 2. The foregoingreviewis, of course,an incompletesketchof the historyof WestI ernphilosophyof self and subjectivity. havestreakedthroughits long corridor to streamlinemy argument. 3. Myinitialsense of the writingselfis inspiredbyJoanWebber's TheEloquent title '," a studyof the seventeenth-century Englishliteraryself-consciousnessand its ethos. RichardRodriguez, whose academicdisciplinewas in the EnglishRenaissance,has namedsuch sensitivity"anattitudeof mind,myimaginationof myself"
in his Hunger ofMemory, 138.

4. Theseterms areadoptedfromTzvetanTodorov's MikhailBakhtin: DialogiThe

cal Principle, especially 94-105.

5.Thisessayis one of those that come fromverylate in Bakhtin's However, activity. I believewith its editorsthat in spite of its lateness,it "willprovidenew confirmation and questions for each of the rapidly emerging Bakhtinian tendencies"
(Emerson et al. Speech Genresx).

6. Thisis the title of HelenFox's book.In discussingculturally diversestudentwritshe calls for "aprofoundrethinkingof the goals and purposesof the univerings, sity"(136). 7. "Epistemological is privilege" TzvetanTotodov'sunderstandingof Bakhtin's "outsidedness." uses this particular He expressionto explainthe statusof the exile,
a mode of being the other, in Nous et les autres:La reflexionfrancaise sur la diversite

Weiss's humanine (390).Anilluminating studyon the subjectof the exileis Timothy

On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S.Naipaul. This book's introduction first ex-

It introduction idea of "outsidedness." is the gist of Weiss's posed me to Bakhtin's and that I havesummarized recasthereto highlightmysense of ontologyof others I and to whose bibliography am indebtedfor the entirenote section here. that 8. I mayalso feel less anxiousabout"thelimitationsof dialogue" KayHalasek is concernedabout (177).Thoughcompletelyutopianin conception,my sense of relationswithin and aroundthe classdifference mayhelp to alleviatethe "power in room" becausestudentsneed not becomeself-consciousaboutdifferences only terms. political

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9. The following study offers a new way of seeing the human community in which, instead of agonistic power politics and ideologies of difference, peace and play will ultimately influence: The Wreath of Wild Olive:Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature,by Mihai I. Spariosu. 10. Complexities involving Bakhtin'sidea of relationships between writers and readers are excellently analyzed in Kay Halaseks A Pedagogy of Possibility, particularly 52-82. 11. In his famous The Plural I, William Coles describes his interest in students' composing of personal identity by dealing with "the paradox of multiplicity in oneness as a writing problem" (86-189). 12. To envision writers in this schematic way may appear un-Bakhtinian, but I may be forgiven for my novice attempt at making a composition project and in view of Bakhtin's own practice of classifying double-voiced discourse in three categories in his Problem ofDostoevskys Poetics (qtd. in Morris 110-11).

Works Cited
Art Mikhail. andAnswerability: Bakhtin, EarlyPhilosophical EssaysbyM.M. Bakhtin. MichaelHolquistand Ed. VadimLiapunov. Trans.and notes by trans.Kenneth Liapunov. Supplement Austin:U of TexasP,1990. Brostrom. and . "Author Heroin Aesthetic Art 4-256. Activity." and Answerability in The -. "Discourse the Novel." Ed. DialogicImagination. Michael Holquist.Trans. CarylEmersonand MichaelHolquist.Austin:U of TexasP, 1981.259-422. . "Response a Question to fromtheNovy MirEditorial Staff." 1-7. SpeechGenres a - "Toward Methodology the for HumanSciences:' 159-72. SpeechGenres -a . Toward Philosophy theAct. of Trans.and notes by VadimLiapunov. Ed. and by VadimLiapunov Michael Holquist.Austin:U of TexasP,1993.

Berlin, Poetics,and James.Rhetorics, Cultures: Studies. English Refiguring IL: 1996. Urbana, NCTE,

"What Bizzell,Patricia. HappensWhen BasicWritersCometo College?" College Notes Madein 1970-71' . "From and 37 Composition Communication & LateEssays.Tran. SpeechGenres Other (1986):294-301. VernW.McGee.Ed.CarylEmersonand MichaelHolquist.Austin:U of TexasP, "SomeImplications of Brummett, Barry. 1986.132-58. or 'Process' 'Intersubjectivity': Postmodern Rhetoric." and Philosophy - . "TheProblemof SpeechGenres." Rhetoric (1976):21-51. 9 60-102. SpeechGenres Clifford, James."OnEthnographic Allegory." - . "TheProblemof the Textin Culture: Poeticsand Politics The Writing and the Human Linguistics, Philology, Ed. and ofEthnography. J.Clifford G. in Sciences:An Experiment PhilosophiU Marcus. P, Berkeley: of California 1986. cal Analysis." Genres 103-31. Speech 98-121.

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Chikako D. Kumamoto
Chikako D. Kumamoto is a professor of English at the College of DuPage, Illinois, where she teaches literature and writing. The genesis of this article is her 1997 CCCCpresentation. She has recently completed another postgraduate degree program in the liberal arts, a notion that she likes to revive and foreground in teaching her two-year college students.

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