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The two prevailing critical paradigms in rhetorical and media studies can be characterized as artistic and ideological. Despite their evident differences, both of these analytical modes impose a final signified on the text. That is to say, each approach insists its critical interpretation is authoritative. Consequently, neither mode is particularly well suited to the broad aims of critical pedagogy, which values the dynamic and always-unfinished interplay among text, citizen-student, and other. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, this essay offers an alternative critical paradigm that values the lived experiences of students and promotes agentive citizenship. This paradigm, which we have dubbed critical-rhetorical pedagogy (CRP), conceptualizes criticism dialogically and situates it in a much larger network of pedagogical and political discourses. To illustrate the utility of CRP, this essay provisionally sketches how it might be practiced to critically engage Stephen Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Gordana Lazić and Larry Erbert for their willingness to dialog with and about Bakhtin, and Greg Dickinson for his support and astute advice. They are also grateful to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.
Notes
Warnick's essay distinguished among four different critical modes: artist, analyst, audience, and advocate. The perspectives of analyst and audience have not enjoyed the same cultural currency in communication studies as artist and advocate, however.
We understand critical pedagogy to be “a dialectical celebration of the languages of critique and possibility—an approach which finds its noblest expression in a discourse integrating critical analysis with social transformation” (Giroux, Pedagogy 132).
Elaborating on this point, James Jasinski wrote, “Rhetorical advocates presume to speak in an authoritative language that mirrors their objective total victory. Authoritative language ‘demands our unconditional allegiance’ and admits only two responses: complete affirmation or complete rejection” (25).
The dialogic critic speaks to the text, not just about it. Criticism is an interaction with the text, not merely a metadiscourse about it. Arguing against a monologic interpretive practice, Jasinski commented, The other interpretive option involves treating the text as a dialogic event. This approach requires the critic to look at the language rather than through it; it involves struggling to account for the various conceptual repercussions and implications of the definitional tension rather than simply dismissing it. … The [dialogic] critic's … task is to reconstruct the dialogue embedded in the dialogic word and polyphonic utterance. (28).
NBC aired Schindler's List on February 23, 1997, from 7:30 PM to 11:00 PM. Ford Motors sponsored the film's televisual showing (“NBC's ‘Schindler'” 22).
See, for example, “The 7th Annual Holocaust Education Week,” January 11–18, 2009, The Holocaust Memorial, Greater Miami Jewish Federation. Web. 31 Mar. 2011; “Holocaust Awareness Week, 3/19/2010, Pine Crest School.” Web. 31 Mar. 2011; “American Corner, Tunis, Holocaust Awareness Week, October 30, 2010.” Web. 1 Apr. 2011; Gregory Gates, “Schindler's List” to Be Shown as Part of Jewish Awareness Month, Planet Blacksburg Apr. 7, 2010. Web. 1 Apr. 2011; “Holocaust Memorial Day—27 January Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.” Web. 30 Mar. 2011.
“Bakhtin defines the novel,” elaborated Glazener “as an intermingling of discourses, unified by the author's significant orchestration but none the less preserving their ideological discreteness. The novel typically foregrounds the social differentiation of these discourses by embodying them in characters who occupy distinct social worlds; it stages their interaction through the confrontations of characters, and usually it sets them against a narrator's diverse and socially significant modes of description, explanation, and judgement as well” (111).
In addition to a number of previously published essays (from Salmagundi, Critical Inquiry, and the book Murder in Our Midst), Loshitzky's edited collection contained several original pieces.
A few examples of the largely negative response to the film by academics include Berstein 429–432; Cardullo 123–124; Epstein 136–138; Hartman 127–145; Nagorski 152–157; and Richler 34, 68.
The “Americanization” of the Holocaust describes “the establishing of a transnational salvation-narrative focusing on Western values” (Classen 101).
We have in mind here Burke's idea of orientation, of frames of acceptance and rejection (Attitudes). Frames of acceptance are not about agreement, but about acknowledgement (of the I-Thou relation).
Dialogic criticism, as well as critical-rhetorical pedagogy generally, shares much in common with Burke's notion of the “unending conversation” (Philosophy 110–111).