ABSTRACT
These two excerpts-the first from Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher of language, and the second from a 51 -year-old immigrant struggling to forge a meaningful life in a non-native language-closely parallel each other. Vera, a journalist in Russia, who later became a kitchen manager in the United States, has articulated a belief that mirrors Bakhtin’s own. Throughout his career, Bakhtin was preoccupied with the themes of selves authoring their signifying spaces and voices embedded in discourse. Some of these voices were dominant and loud, while others were subdued and weak. In communist Russia, he could not overtly argue for a social theory of the self. Thus, Bakhtin turned to the novel and to the analysis of complex relationships between authors and heroes, between utterances themselves as a metaphor for human existence. Although philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists have increasingly used Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and subjectivity, his ideas remain largely unexplored by second language researchers. The Russian thinker, in whose framework people acquire awareness in their native language, and to whom selves are always located “on the threshold” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 147), wasn’t explicitly concerned with issues of education, nor was he
overtly interested in second language acquisition. What insights, then, could Bakhtin offer to our understanding of adult immigrants, who themselves are on the threshold, entering new linguistic and social landscapes? How do they author themselves in a complex interplay of discourses? How can an ordinary second language speaker enact agency, and what is the nature of agency? To address these complex questions, I turn to the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and his philosophy of language and self. My discussion pivots on the three interrelated concepts of voice, consciousness, and answerability, as these can be traced in the lived experiences of three East European immigrants.
