ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, many literary theorists have advocated a return to rhetorical criticism. All of these theorists, in advocating a return to rhetoric as a critical practice, drop Mikhail Bakhtin's name, but none has gone on to explore the ways in which his work might inform the rhetorical criticism they advocate. In transmitting or conveying another's discourse, Bakhtin describes rhetorical forms as serving functional, informational, and communicative ends, and these forms are dialogized only insofar as they "re-accentuate" another's words and give the retransmitted utterance an authorial flavor. Rhetorical genres play a role in Bakhtin's historical poetics but only insofar as they promote the novel. The rhetorical element is no longer "rhetorical" in Bakhtin's pejorative sense of the word, for that term in his scheme is reserved for those genres that deny or ignore dialogism and heteroglossia and are themselves the target of carnival.
