I begin this today as my brain is jagged from thinking and my face all a-spasm from prolonged screen-staring. What better to do now, I thinks to myself, than open yet another writing outlet? On a beautiful day? A Friday, no less? Well, this is the life of a PhD student, so I may as well embrace it, eh? Come join me. Group hug.
And besides, I've made an exciting discovery. Mikhail Bakhtin is his name. 'Re-discovery' would be more apt, actually, as he featured in my undergraduate work too, but I wasn't quite ready to absorb him then - I didn't have the 'in' I have now. Namely, the question I was asked by my progression panel in January, something along the lines of:
'You make a lot of grand theoretical claims, using concepts like identity, voice, and agency. What do you mean by these terms?'
I stumbled; I fumbled, I bumbled. And went home and thought: What is it that I mean? Why do I believe in agency? It's an emotionally appealing concept, right? What more basis than that? But 'because it is' is no justification for anything, and I had to find some way to articulate my use of the term. Enter Bakhtin, who had reared his imposing forehead several times during my reading, and whose proffered thread I decided to take up in earnest. His work on dialogism offers a useful foundation for narrative methodology, and for the concepts of agency and voice I'm trying to formulate; not least in my reflexive work, and my attempts to find my own voice as an academic writer among the voices of so many others. Aha. Is this why I've started blogging..?
There's something else at work here too: Bakhtin provides a connection to my literature-student days, which I’ve only recently linked to my interest in narrative research. As an undergraduate I was fascinated by what stories do, how they negotiate the space between the words used to tell them and the worlds which create them, and are reflected and transformed by them. Since I’ve been an education postgraduate I’ve felt distant at times from my first academic interest, but now I’m reconnecting. So I can identify the emotional appeal of Bakhtin – now to explore the intellectual appeal, and to consider how they intersect. And I'll post more on Himself on my website when I've done some more thinking.
I'm going outside now.
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