Foregrounding language and the utterance in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his colleague Valentin Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality examines their insights against the background of the classical, predominantly Aristotelian, verbal liberal arts of rhetoric, dialectic, and poetics. First setting Bakhtinian dialogics against a narrow rhetoric aimed at winning over others, it goes on, drawing upon the school's earlier phenomenological and sociological writings, to elaborate a Bakhtinian discourse theory that sees all utterances as rhetorical in an expanded sense and poetry as an imitation of rhetorical utterance.

Bialostosky invents a Bakhtinian dialogic criticism that he situates against such figures as Todorov, Gadamer, Rorty, and Booth and explores the potentials of Bakhtin-School thought for a revitalized rhetorical criticism. He draws parallels between Bakhtin's dialogism and Michael Billig's sophistic sociology and argues the importance of language and history in Bakhtin's earliest work against Morson and Emerson's emphasis on ethics. He sets Aristotelian rhetoric against Bakhtin's discourse theory and reads Aristotle's Poetics against the grain to bring out its category of "thought" or dianoia as a site from which a Bakhtinian poetics of utterance can be recovered. A compilation and extension of more than thirty years' work on the Bakhtin School, Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality demonstrates the rich implications of Bakhtin's works for rhetorical theory, practice, and understanding.

• ISBN-13: 9781602357259
• Pitt Faculty: Don Bialostosky
• Release Year: 2016
• Publisher: Parlor Press