ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Mikhail Bakhtin's understanding of discourse offers us a way of reading Linda's text beyond the boundaries of the content/form and personal/public dichotomies, a way that asks us to listen and speak back to a student's many voices as he or she searches for the means to form her experience in the contentious social arena of writing. Composition teachers frequently talk about encouraging students to find and develop their individual voices and about the diversity of voices within a classroom. Encouraging both teachers and students to listen and speak back to their dialogically-charged words is what a Bakhtinian reading seeks. Instead, a Bakhtinian reading enables students and teachers to recognize the multiple perspectives and multiple messages a single text communicates through its moldable, reverberating collections of personal and public voices. Linda, however, raises the voices in readers' minds in order to speak against them.
