Totalitarian Visual “Monologue”: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin

Ekaterina V. Haskins Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ; James P. Zappen Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship has noted Mikhail M. Bakhtin's apparent animosity toward rhetoric. Bakhtin's distinction between monologue and dialogue helps to explain his view of rhetoric, which is both hostile and receptive—hostile to monologic rhetoric but receptive to a dialogic rhetoric that is responsive to others. This article reads Bakhtin's account of monologue and dialogue as a reaction to the pervasive totalitarian visual rhetoric of the Soviet state. Drawing on Bakhtin's descriptions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and various kinds of double-voiced discourse—parody, satire, and polemic—the article analyzes the workings of Soviet visual rhetoric as both monologic and potentially dialogic and recovers the various forms of otherness displaced by this rhetoric.

Journal
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published
2010-08-31
DOI
10.1080/02773945.2010.499860
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Advances in the History of Rhetoric

References (41) · 3 in this index

  1. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
  2. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
  3. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
  4. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
  5. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Show all 41 →
  1. ——— .Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. 1968 . Bloomington : Midland-Indiana University Press , …
  2. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation
  3. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation
  4. Baxandall , Michael .Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford , UK : Oxford University Pres…
  5. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  6. 10.2307/462355
     ↗
  7. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin
  8. 10.2307/2166382
     ↗
  9. 10.2307/130593
     ↗
  10. Brooks , Jeffrey .Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War. Princeton , N…
     ↗
  11. 10.1080/07491409.1998.10162552
     ↗
  12. 10.2307/2500844
     ↗
  13. Clark , Katerina , and Michael Holquist .Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge : Belknap-Harvard University Press , 1984…
  14. 10.1080/07491409.2000.10162566
     ↗
  15. Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West
  16. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin
     ↗
  17. 10.1353/rap.2005.0037
     ↗
  18. Fitzpatrick , Sheila.Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization…
     ↗
  19. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
  20. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  21. Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941
  22. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  23. Kenez , Peter.A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End. Cambridge : Cambridge University P…
  24. The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History
  25. Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges
  26. Morson , Gary Saul , and Caryl Emerson .Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford : Stanford Universi…
     ↗
  27. 10.1080/00335630109384336
     ↗
  28. Ouspensky , Leonid , and Vladimir Lossky .The Meaning of Icons. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky . …
  29. Owens , Louis.Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman : Oklahoma University Press , 2001…
  30. 10.2307/469269
     ↗
  31. The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space
  32. Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents
  33. The Lubok: Russian Folk Pictures 17th to 19th Century
  34. 10.2307/129400
     ↗
  35. White , Stephen.The Bolshevik Poster. New Haven : Yale University Press , 1988 . Print .
  36. Textura. Russian Essays on Visual Culture