An Essay on Pedagogy by Mikhail M. Bakhtin

Abstract

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School.” In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every grammatical form is a representation of reality and needs to be taught in relation to stylistic choices; otherwise, grammar instruction is pedantic and leads students to write in a deadening bookish style. Bakhtin describes and analyzes a lesson on the stylistic force of parataxic sentences. He asks students to identify the voice and psychological expression conveyed in examples from Pushkin and Gogol, so they may recover the liveliness in their expression that they had in their younger grades, but at a higher level of cultural development. He finds that after instruction, students use more parataxic sentences, increasing the liveliness of their writing.