The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin was introduced into academic circles the ‘70s and ‘80s, the heyday of French post-structuralist literary criticism.  His name quickly became synonymous with the "dialogical" or "prosaic" approach to literary analysis, which found wide acceptance.  Through steady dissemination, terms like "polyphony," "heteroglossia," "double-voiced discourse," "linguistic hybridization," "unfinalizability," and "speech genre" came to signal fascinating methodological reorientations in the humanities and social sciences.  Superb secondary commentary – most notably by Emerson and Morson's Bakhtin:  Creation of a Prosaics – offered a comprehensive account of all phases of Bakhtin's career, and Bakhtin was soon to be found at the center of burgeoning interdisciplinary debates.

    Bakhtin's academic ascendancy is perhaps best explained by three reasons.  First, the "modernism/postmodernism" debates of the ‘70s and ‘80s polarized most disciplines, producing what now appears as a static, boring stand-off between two styles of research.  Bakhtin moves us beyond this stasis, his "prosaic" approach to language providing a potential common ground for modernists and post-modernists alike.  Second, Bakhtin's notion of the "linguistic," "discursive," or "symbolic" construction of identity suited the new constellation of multidisciplinary, methodological pluralism emerging in disciplines ranging from philosophy and psychology to political science and cultural theory.  Third, psychologists have elaborated Bakhtin's "dialogical" model of self to the point that it now faces empirical testing and clinical trial.  The 1992 publication of The Dialogical Self by Dutch psychologists Hubert Hermans and Harry Kempen was crucial, as it presented a dialogical theory that could serve both researchers and therapists.

    The recent "International Conference on the Dialogical Self"  in Nijmegen demonstrated both he potential fruitfulness and the conceptual volatility of a Bakhtin-inspired psychology.  Many participants pointed out that Hermans and Kempen's model rests exclusively upon the central concept of Bakhtin's second period, polyphony, and that conceptual resources from his third and fourth periods remain untapped.  Clinicians struggled with the question of how psychotherapy might be altered by the dialogical model.  Developmental psychologists raised questions about how motor, perceptual, and cognitive abilities form in pre-linguistic "pseudo- dialogues" with caregivers.  In several keynote addresses, participants raised philosophical concerns about the ontology of the one (unity) and many (plurality) selves (Jaan Valsiner), the moral and political inplications of the dialogical approach (Henderikus Stam and Ivana Markova), the way in which narrative self-ascriptions and achievement are correlated (Dan McAdams), and, finally, whether the dialogical model radically overcomes Cartesian distinctions between "inner" and "outer" to embrace a truly relational model of identity (Kenneth Gergen).

    All three of these promising developments point to the need for additional interdisciplinary examination of Bakhtin's ideas, and discussion of their applicability to the issues of authorship, identity, and power.  This is our hope in convening this symposium:  to consider the ways Bakhtin's ideas may help move beyond the modernism vs. post-modernism stalemate, to conceptualize the coherence of selves which are composed of a multiplicity of voices, and perhaps to reconcile the two emerging views of identity:  one based on the unity provided by a life-story, the other on the dispersion of personality in dialogue.
 

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