ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the key limitations identified in the work of L. S. Vygotsky, and aims to develop further tools for linguistic analysis, by linking the works of Vygotsky and Leont’ev to the works of Bakhtin and Voloshinov - particularly the latter. Vygotsky himself might have counselled that this task should be approached, not by ‘patching together a lot of quotations’, but rather by extending and developing on the basis of his own method. For while Vygotsky clearly saw his own method developing on the basis of Marx’s method, Wertsch explicitly seeks to foreclose that line of development. Instead James V. Wertsch offers a reading of Vygotsky where the relationship to Marx appears incidental. This strangely parallels the much-criticized original English translation of Vygotsky’s Thinking and Speech, where the references which establish that relationship were almost all expunged from the text.
