ABSTRACT
Mikhail Bakhtin's writings suggest a new meaning for the concept of rhetoric because they refuse the great modern division between "language" and "ideology". The diversity of social languages Bakhtin called "heteroglossia"—or "verbal-ideological points of view"—appear in the novel, parody, and certain forms of popular literature. In his later work, Bakhtin bridges rhetoric and literary fiction by accentuating parody as turning another speaker's language against itself. Most handbooks of rhetoric provide accessible vocabulary keys to the markers of the official, middle or "plain," and colloquial or subcultural styles. Richard Lanham's pedagogy and Bakhtin's rhetoric both argue a parodic stance toward institutionalized languages, but Lanham's verbal performer will not really be a critic of such languages. Bakhtin's rhetoric identifies the contemporary fragmentation of languages as conflicting exercises of power and resistance waged in the media of discourse, visible today not only in literature but in the languages of everyday life and the composition classroom.
