Narrative Psychology's Reading of Bakhtin

The idea that fiction is a representation or imitation of life, or the product of mimesis, is one that has intrigued literary theorists since Aristotle and Plato. Many modern theorists, including Auerbach, argue that there is an "interpretation of reality through literary representation or imitation" (554). However, the question of "How can we best represent lived experience?" is also being asked by those in Narrative Psychology. Literary theorists and narrative psychologists have turned to Bakhtin (often referring to his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics[1]) in order to try to answer this question. In fact, in the Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin argues that the modern polyphonic novel can provide "a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the open ended present)" (7). Bakhtin argues that the novel is the literary form that can best approximate lived experience because the novel "reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of unfolding" (7).

Through out Bakhtin's writing he attempts to "grope [his] way toward the basic structural characteristics of [the novel]"(Dialogic Imagination 11). The first goal of the paper is to show how Narrative Psychology applies these structural characteristics that Bakhtin identifies in the novel to lived experience itself. Specifically, I will show how Narrative Psychologists use Bakhtin's concepts of chronotope, genre, dialogue and polyphony of voices. Narrative psychology uses these concepts in order to understand what role the individual has in constructing his identity and the narrative that surrounds his life. In the second part of this paper, I will suggest how Narrative Psychology's application of Bakhtinian concepts to lived experience might affect composition studies. In other words, I will attempt to understand the possible implications of this application in the composition classroom.

What is Narrative Psychology?

Narrative psychology, and its applied version in the form of narrative therapy, tries to understand how people create meaning in their lives by constructing narratives. In "What is Narrative? Ricouer, Bakhtin and Process Approaches", Jenny Rankin writers that, "Narrative is gradually coming to be comprehended as the ground in which, the relations through which and the vehicle by which humans develop knowledge of themselves and the world they inhabit" (8). Narrative Psychology uses narrative in order to show how the narrator, the teller of the tale, determines or selects the events to be aware of or concerned with (Gergen 2). Narrative psychology argues that there is a hermeneutics to life just as there is to text (Ezzy 5). Thus the narrator interprets the events; the events do not have any meaning for the individual until this interpretation occurs. The narrator comes to understand the events that have preceded and events that are to come about because of this selection.

Bakhtin's Chronotopes in Narrative Psychology

Narrative Psychology uses Bahktin's work on narrative structure of the modern novel to suggest that it is possible to render the mental human experience through narrative by way of the chronotope. In "Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel," Bakhtin argues that chronotopes "are the organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel" (250). In the Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin describes the structural characteristic of the chronotope in the novel by writing,

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history (85).

Narrative Psychologists argue that Bakhtin's notion of chronotope is effective because it shapes narrative. Thus, when people narrate lived experience, they appeal to certain chronotopes. For instance, in "The Person as a Motivated Story-Teller," Hermans "views story as a way of organizing episodes, actions, and accounts of actions in time and space" (1). Narrative psychology tries to understand how the chronotope functions in terms of shaping lived experience through narrative. For example, in one article, "In Dialogue With Time," B'ulow argues that "when we are stricken with an illness or some other affliction, the temporal frame- works that we take for granted in our everyday lives are overturned" (1). People who have faced illnesses often talk about the "sort of person" they have become because of coping with this illness. People who have or are suffering from illnesses talk about mark the time of their illness in terms of "before," "after" and "during" their illness as a way to understand the way the illness has changed or affected their lived experience. Someone suffering from a chronic illness may then see time marked by treatments or by the taking of medicine. Also, people who are suffering or have suffered from an illness may find different aspects of life to be important than before the onset of the illness.

Bakhtin argues that "'out of the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented [in the novel]" (Dialogic Imagination 7). In the context of the novel, chronotope is the intersection of time and space. The way in which time and space is understood and represented within a novel has implications on what is possible in terms of the structure of the novel. In other words, the characters, the actions of those characters and the interactions of those characters, are all influenced by the construction of time and space within the novelistic form. For example, Bakhtin uses the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel to understand how the chronotope of the carnival influences the liberation of the various characters from the day to day demands of their lives (Rabelais and His World 58).

However, if an individual's life is seen as a narrative form that parallels the novel (and as Bakhtin claims, the novel best represents lived experience) then it is important to understand what is the chronotopal dimension to lived experience. Narrative psychology tries to understand how chronotopal experience of individuals changes through narrative formations. The interaction of space and time is a factor in the experience of an individual, however, the way in which chronotopes shape an individual's narrative sense of life, and his identity, has interesting implications. Narrative psychology tries to understand these chronotopal dimensions of lived experience. One of the implications of this understanding Narrative Psychology's notion of the self. If the notion of self, particular to a time and space, is socially and culturally constructed through the interaction of the individual with his environment, then it is reasonable to assume that the individual's perception of time and space would be also be created dialogically. Narrative psychologists argue that the spatio-temporal conditions influence the choices that an individual makes when constructing narratives. In fact, narrative psychologists argue that "there is a constant change in the structure of situations and in positions occupied by spatially-located actors who are oriented to the world and toward one another as intentional beings" (Gergen 2). Thus, an individual acquires chronotopes through lived experience. As in the case of a person suffering from an illness, the chronotopal dimension of lived experience can change according to the spatial-temporal conditions that an individual is faced.

Thus, in terms of the narrator, or the individual who is in the process of "writing" the narrative, events are always presented in some sort of order (Gergen 3). What meaning any event has to an individual is the result of the connections that are perceived between events occurring at different times and places (Gergen 3). All memories, all stories that people tell, are framed by beginnings and endings and the interpretation of those events by the individual. Thus, the perceived beginning and endings of these events is related to what significance the individual or the narrator sees in terms of those events. When an individual narrates an experience, the experience shaped by the chronotope (Gergen 4). According to narrative psychologists, the chronotopes shapes the beginnings and endings that an individual sees in lived experience (Gergen 6).

Narrative psychologists see the narrative made available by chronotopes constructs the identity of the individual. Narrative psychology looks at the self as a self-narrating organism and that identity is not fixed over a lifetime (3). Since circumstances of that individual continually changes over an individual's life-time, the way in which an individual constructs his identity also changes the way in which the individual constructs his narrative. Narrative psychologists attempt to understand these changing chronotopes (Murray 5).

This conception of personal identity tries to understand how memory is shaped by chronotopes. Through the process of memory, and the narrative traditions that are present in language and culture, a conception of personal identity is posited by narrative psychology (Gergen 10). Accordingly, "One must identify oneself as a particular identity, moving through time, in certain directions with certain points prominent. To 'remember properly' is to generate a story replete with the earmarks of the well formed narrative" (Gergen 10). In understanding the construction of identity, narrative psychology argues that "all we have is the experience of the world" and the stories that serve as units of meaning that provides a frame for this lived experience (Murray 2). The very act of narration leads to an impression of continuity of self and introduces a sense of unity to a person's life (Ezzy 6) Narrative identity is then understood to be fluid and changeable. Narrative psychology recognizes that the identity of an individual is shaped chronotopally and constructed in interaction and dialogue with other people (Ezzy 6). The chronotopal understanding of identity by narrative psychologists is developed by the understanding that:

The individual lives in the present and is, from a specific point in space and time, oriented to past and future and to the surrounding world. The individual not only orients successively to different parts of his or her spatio-temporal situation, but also brings those parts together in an organized story or self-narrative (Hermans 7).

Narrative Psychology argues that in order to understand the way in which chronotopes shape memory, is important to recognize the "experiential now," or lived experience in terms of the present, as a fluid and changing phenomenon. Just as " Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible" via the chronotope, the experiential now becomes relatively stable (Dialogic Imagination 250). Narrative Psychologists explore this how the fluidity of the chronotope can be seen as stable by appealing to Bakhtin's concept of genre.

Genre Theory in Narrative Psychology

Although the illusory narrative unity serves as the basis of an, equally illusory, coherent identity for the individual, the individual functions within a multitude of genres. Bakhtin argues that there are relatively stable forms of speech that can be identified as genres (Speech Genres 108). The stories that a person tells, and the events that a person must interpret to make sense of these events, occur in various chronotopal contexts that function in particular forms. The events for any individual do not occur in any seamless or unorganized manner without appeal to certain forms, or genres. These genres both construct and are constructed by cultural beliefs, institutions and expectations, and not created by the individual. The events are perceived generically by an individual and contribute to a narrative unity. Thus, the individual is not the author of his life, and the genres that the individual encounters, but the narrator. Just as a narrator tells the story of events chronotopally, the individual does this in the context of multitudes of genres. These genres often serve as expectations for the individual of how the events should transpire, and construct the meaning for the individual. How the individual orders these events, where the beginning and ending occurs as a result of the individual narrating these events, occurs according to specific genres.

In narrative psychology, the Bakhtinian concept of "genres" is complimented by the concept of "life scripts." These life scripts are understood in terms of stereotypical dramas that repeat through out a person's life. For instance, if an individual thinks of himself as a failure, events in this person's life is understood of this repeated "script." However, the goal for the psychotherapist working in a narrative psychological frame of reference is to help the client see these, often repeated, life-scripts. The client is asked to understand the origin of these scripts, in order for the client to be able to see options that are not perceived as available within these scripts. In other words, people tell stories about the events in their lives by appealing to larger narratives that they are exposed to, which are generated according to certain narrative genres. In the case study "A Proposal for a Re-authoring Therapy: Rose's Revisioning of her Life and a Commentary," "Rose" has a history of losing jobs. She comes to therapy in order to remedy this problem. In the course of therapy, she explains that she feels like she is a fake person. The therapist then tries to understand what the story behind this perception is. She tells the story of repeated abuse by her father, a man who was viewed by the community as a good man. She explains that she had to reinforce this image of her father by denying the pain that her father inflicted on her during her childhood. Throughout the therapy session, as she tells her story, the therapist becomes aware of the way she tells this story (Murray 4). In a sense, she manifests a certain genre of abuse--of a person who feels silenced and must pretend that the abuse is not happening.

A narrative approach to identity recognizes that social roles and practices influence our personal narratives. For instance, in "How to Shake off the Great Narrative of Motherhood," Eero Suonien argues that the guilt that one mother feels about her ability to raise her child is based on the acceptance of certain socially constructed life scripts. In this case study, a mother is trying to decide whether or not to relinquish custody of her children, and if she does choose to give up the custody of her children, how to deal with the guilt and anxiety she feels as a result of this decision. She recognizes that she is not in the position to adequately raise the children and ultimately decides that she will give up custody to the father. The author of this case study argues that there is a genre of motherhood that women appeal to in order to define what the role of a mother should be. In the example given in Suonien's study, one mother is concerned with whether or not she is adequately raising her child, and whether or not she will be a "good" mother if she chooses to let someone else raise her children. The mother's anxiety is based on cultural expectations--the cultural expectations that defines a mother as someone who raises their children. In the particular case of this mother, the woman must decide whether this genre of motherhood is one that she can realistically lived up to. In the course of this case study, the mother is able to accept another genre, that of a mother who wants the best for her child even if this means not raising the child. These cultural expectations, what it means to be a mother, influence the eventual choices the mother makes in decisions about child rearing. This example illustrates the way in which narratives then develop in a cultural context according to specific genres.

Narrative psychologists argue that the unreflective dialogic relationship between the individual and the culturally prescribed genres can cause anxiety within the individual. According to Martha Isaac in "Language Memory: The Value of Narrative Inquiry in a Caribbean Bilingual Community," socially constructed or influenced narratives that are not mediated by personal reflection can prevent people from feeling and seeing a multitude of choices. The struggle for narrative psychologists and their clients in therapy is then to help the client learn various strategies to construct narratives that are more positive.

The Dialogic Self and Polyphony of Voices

The question of identity, what is the self, in relationship to a notion of a life defined by narratives has been explored by those in "Narrative Psychology." There have been many explanations of the origin of the self in psychology (including James, Freud, Piaget and Lacan), however, Narrative psychologists argue that the self develops according to the Bakhtinian concept of dialogue. For instance, in "The Dialogical Self in the First Two years of Life: Embarking on a Journey of Discovery," the infant's sense of self develops according to a Bakhtinian notion of dialogue. Narrative psychologists argue that an infant, even before being able to speak, has a sense of self that is dependent on the social relationships she is part of. She develops expectations, for instance, that rely on the "unique perspective that she can share with her mother" which in turn tells the infant that "I am different from you, yet we are similar and can share experiences" (13). In turn, the identity of the eventual child and adult that the infant then depends on the narratives, the stories, that it will be exposed to later on through dialogue with other members of its family and other social interactions. The infant's developing sense of time, place and historicity depends on the expectations and behaviors of those in his environment.

The dialogic notion of the self is developed in narrative psychology by the use of the Bakhtinian concept of polyphony of voices. Narrative psychology argues that it is the goal of the individual to unify multiple thoughts and voices within and from without that individual in order to form "a purposive self whose narrative is that of an [illusory] unified self" (Barresi 10). Just as the originality of the novel is constituted by the relationship between the narrator and his/her characters, lived experience is constituted by a polyphony of voices. The sense of the unified self is always challenged by the polyphony of voices that an individual encounters. Thus, with dialogue among these voices, "there is a factor of incompleteness, of remaining unfinished, that affects not only the characters and their world view" (Ricoeur 97). The unfinalizability of the novel due to the polyphony of voices parallels the unfinalizability of the self.

Therapeutic Implications of a Bakhtinian Approach

Our perception of lived experience can be constructed according to the dialogic demands of certain situations, thus creating "life plans" or narratives. Narrative Psychologists argue that the construction of a healthy self is dependent on flexible narratives. The definition of what is healthy and what is unhealthy depends on narratives that can change according to new experiences. Thus, these narratives must be flexible so that they can shift according to changes in expectations. For example, one self-help "life coach" challenges her clients to recognize their own narrative because, "Expectations that are unspoken, unrealistic, and unmet can cause us to do such things as take the wrong fork in the road and punish the people we love" (Britten 16). Narrative Psychologists argue that the way in which can people develop healthier narratives can be through "re-authoring" narratives.

Narrative psychology recognizes that people have the capacity to re-author their lives and relationships (Murray 5). Narrative therapy is based on the idea that "lives and relationships of persons are shaped by the very knowledge and stories that persons use to give meaning to their experiences." Narrative therapy strives to give individuals the ability to "re-author" their lives by way of "alternative knowledge/stories and practices of self and relationship that have preferred outcomes" (Murray 16). Narrative psychology recognizes that "there is a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty to all stories, and, as well, there are inconsistencies and contradictions" (4). In addition, there is an understanding that "people tell, at least to some extent, different self-narratives to different people and in different contexts" (Herman 8). Narrative psychologists recognize that the identity of a person depends on stories, and choose to identify "coherent" narratives as the basis of unity in the individual. Thus, there is a " subjective sense of self-continuity as it symbolically integrates the events of lived experience in the plot of the story a person tells about his or her life" (Ezzy 1). However, this perception of narrative unity, even in the process of re-authoring, is the goal of narrative therapy, and certain psychological disorders, such as multiple personality, are understood by narrative psychology to be the result of traumatic events which cause a disjunction of personal narrative.

In the case study example given in "A Proposal for a Re-authoring Therapy: Rose's Revisioning of her Life and a Commentary," Rose tells the story of being abused and silenced in her family and community about her abuse. She realizes, through the telling of her story, that much of her feelings of inadequacy as an adult are the result of feeling inadequate during the time of the abuse. She explains that part of the pattern of abuse was being told by her father that she was not worthwhile. In the process of telling her story, she was able to understand the story from another perspective and no longer had to accept the interpretation of the events given by her father at the time: You are worthless, and therefore I can do whatever I want to you. After she told her story, she says to the therapist,

It helped me understand what had happened and possibly why it had happened ... my reactions to what had happened and the end result. Looking at it and following it through gave me a sense of relief and understanding.... It was a relief that it wasn't my fault ... that there were things that had happened to me as a child and I had been basically reacting ever since.... A lot of the negative feelings I had about myself had been enforced when I was younger by a parent figure (father?). And I took that attitude, consciously or unconsciously, and continued to think that way about myself" (Murray 16).

Before therapy, Rose lived her life according to the story she had learned as a child: that of a "worthless" individual. By telling her story, she was able to understand herself differently and "an 'alternative' story became very plausible" (Murray 18). Thus, the construction of a coherent narrative that has more positive outcomes is created dialogically through the re-telling and re-framing of experiences to the narrative therapist. The narrative therapist then helps the client to see their story through alternative genres that the client might not be aware of.

Implications on the Composition Classroom

How can the way in which narrative psychology reads Bakhtin be applied to the composition classroom? I ask this question in reaction to Kay Halasek's call to apply Bakhtin to the composition classroom. Her book, A Pedagogy of Possibility and other compositionists (including Welch, Farmer and Zappen) who attempt to apply Bakhtin, opens the way for the question of how psychology might use Bakhtinian concepts, and what this application might suggest about an application of Bakhtin to the composition classroom.

Applications of Bakhtin to composition classroom have argued that Bakhtin "explains how people acquire language and read and write texts" (Honeycutt). Goleman writes, "In composition studies today, it is common for scholars to perform Bakhtinian readings of student writing" (49). Compositionists, including Welch, Halasek and Farmer, then suggest applying Bakhtin to the composition classroom in various ways. Some ways include:

• looking at their student's writing for instances of multiple voices and looking for the polyphony of voices that the student performs in the text (Goleman 50). Compositionists (including Halasek, Welch and Farmer) also ask their students to play with multiple discourses.

• suggesting a revision exercise in which students are asked to rewrite an experience from the points of view of multiple narrators (56).

• argue against a monologic writing process in favor of recognizing and playing with multiple voices and points of view. For instance, Halasek argues that students often view texts monologically, and do not understand the tensions of the voices behind the voices (123).

The result of this Bakhtinian application to reading and writing in the composition classroom, which Halasek characterizes as "uncritical," is students who grant "authority" to texts and cannot question the texts that they are exposed to. The challenge, then, is for the composition instructor to engage the students into a dialogue with the text (126).

These Bakhtinian applications are not negated by Narrative Psychology's reading of Bakhtin. I will argue, however, that it does present a fuller picture of the theoretical implications to the composition classroom. Appealing to Narrative Psychology reinforces the idea that students should, as Halasek argues, actively engage with the text. However, Narrative Psychology explains the process by which students (and people in general) become creative and active participants, both in terms of writing in the composition classroom and in their lives in general.

The appeal to psychology for understanding the composition classroom is not new. For example, Alcorn (2001) looks at grief work in therapy in order to understand how the attempt to change student's values in the composition classroom causes anxiety. Berman (2001) tries to understand the role of sexual disclosures, often the domain of psychotherapy, in the composition classroom. Many composition theorists have tried to understand the phenomena of resistance, a concept borrowed from psychology, in the composition classroom. Bracher (1999) argues that a psychoanalytic pedagogy can be used to understand the psychological conflicts underlying the writing process.

Narrative psychology applies Bakhtin by recognizing that the individual speaks "in many voices from multiple points of view" (Parry 12). As I have noted earlier, other compositionists argue the same in their application of Bakhtin to the composition classroom. However, narrative psychologists extend this polyphony of voices by trying to understand how the "consciousness of ourselves is constructed out of the stories we tell ourselves and the world and the stories we come to believe in what others tell us about ourselves" (Parry 15). The telling of these stories, when a person "narrates," or, in other words, "writes," occurs not only in the context of the composition classroom but in terms of lived experience in general. The implication of narrative psychology is that students not only "write," in the sense of producing texts, in the composition classroom, but construct narratives in all areas of their lives. Since "we become psychological beings who are incapable of not narrating our experiences both to ourselves and each other (Parry 16)", students are not only introduced to writing in an academic setting. They are already "writers"--just not always in the academic context.

However, students may not recognize the authorship of their lives, just as individuals in general do not always recognize this authorship. Narrative psychologists argue that, "until we assume intentional authorship of these narrative event our experience tends to be of them happening to us, rather than by our intending them" (Parry 19). The goal of narrative therapy is to facilitate some sense of personal authorship or agency concerning events of one's life. This agency is encouraged through "re-authoring therapy." Just as re-authoring therapy recognizes that the stories that a person tells can change and do change in the process of lived experience, the challenge in the composition classroom is to help students attain this narrative agency.

If students are to write in the classroom, and integrate a new (academic) polyphony of voices in their writing, then the role of the composition instructor would be also facilitate some sort of sense of personal authorship in the student. The implication of narrative psychology is that our students are writing their lives at the same time that they are writing their papers. This also suggests that the way students write their lives have implications on how they write in the composition classroom.

The idea of narrative agency proposed by Narrative Psychologists does not negate the impact of social practices and purposes on the individual. The individual does not create the genres, chronotopes or polyphony of voices that he encounters in a life-time. However, as demonstrated in the case studies, people do have some agency when they reflect on the genres, chronotopes and polyphony of voices. Often individuals do not recognize any other way of telling their story. The goal of Narrative Therapy, especially in the technique of "re-authoring" is for the individual, through dialogue with the therapist, to see their stories in a different way. This parallels the instructor who asks the student to write about an experience from another point of view.

It is important to recognize that one of the challenges in narrative therapy is that "narratives become established and duly justified as our world, narratives that students are defending. Narrative psychologists recognize that "we invariably fall short of our own sense of identity, narrative or self-image [which] has taken on a life of its own." When a narrative "takes a life of its own" and the individual recounts this narrative unreflectively, the individual can not see any other way of telling their story. (Parry 20) Understanding that students are defending their narrative--the way they write their story--adds a new dimension to the notion of resistance to the composition classroom.

In addition, Narrative Psychologists understand "that expressions and gestures are observed by others, but often remain oblivious to the person himself" (Parry 20). This monologic tendency of the individual, who can not view himself the way others view himself, applies to the construction of narratives out of lived experience, and to the writing context of the composition classroom. Not only do students often defend their narratives, and become resistant to alterations of those narratives, students can not always read their narratives in the same way that a peer or instructor would. A Narrative Psychological approach would further justify the benefits of a collaborative (and dialogically) approach to the writing process because students would necessarily benefit from the reading of others of their narrative. However, the Narrative Psychology approach would also recognize that these readings would not always be readily accepted.

The way in which "re-authoring" therapy occurs, in order to help individuals change or modify their life experiences, has implications on the composition classroom. We must recognize that when we expose our students to new texts, new genres, and new ways of writing, we are in a sense engaging in "re-authoring" therapy. The starting point of "re-authoring" therapy is the recognition that all individuals have is their lived experience of the world (Murray 1). Compositionists must recognize this of students as well. Students come to the classroom with genres, informed by their own chronotopes and polyphony of voices, which may not correspond with those introduced in the composition classroom.

"Re-authoring" therapy, by applying narrative psychology's understanding of Bakhtin, recognizes that "life is the performance of texts" (Murray 1). Other compositionists have recognized the performative aspects of writing, however, "re-authoring" therapy recognizes that "with every performance, persons are re-authoring their lives and relationships" (Murray 2). When we, as compositionists, ask students to "perform" in the classroom by writing, we must recognize that we are asking them to re-author their lives.

It is important to note that when a client comes to a therapist, they are coming out of some desire to change their behavior, life circumstances, or perception of those life circumstances. They come to therapy out for some psychological reason, often rooted in some emotional distress manifesting itself in unease, disappointment, dissatisfaction or anxiety. One important difference between re-authoring therapy and the composition classroom is that students do not come to the composition classroom with the same psychological and emotional motivations. However, students do come to college for some motivation, and enter into the composition classroom with some knowledge that the composition classroom is designed to improve their writing skills, although they may feel ambivalence about this attempt. However, asking our students to "re-author" their lives, by introducing them to genres that entail new ways of thinking and writing they may have not encountered before, might generate some anxiety. Malcolm Alcorn argues that grief is a prerequisite to learning because learning means letting go off old ideas (2001). This is in turn causes anxiety, and the instructor must be able to manage this anxiety. If anxiety does manifest itself in the course of the composition classroom, how Narrative Psychologists manage this anxiety in the course of re-authoring therapy could help instructor know how to mediate this psychological affect of learning.

What then could be the practical application of Narrative Psychology's reading of Bakhtin to the composition classroom? If narrative agency is what Narrative Psychology tries to encourage in therapy, what kind of narrative agency could we hope to encourage in our students? What would this narrative agency look like and how could we, as composition instructors, encourage it? In answering these questions, I turn to my composition classroom experiences, in which I have been struggling with the possible applications of Bakhtin, especially in light of Narrative Psychology's reading of Bakhtin.

The most obvious application that I see is in teaching the mode of narrative writing. Certainly, when asking students to write narrative, as opposed to other modes of writing, including descriptive, informative or research modes, we try to encourage our students to reflect on how they tell different stories. We also assign readings in the form of narratives for students to learn how to write essays. However, I recognize that not all composition instructors choose this narrative genre in the composition classroom. However, Narrative Psychology's recognition that students are constructing narratives all the time suggests that no matter what genre we teach in the composition classroom, the principles and strategies of narratives are always at work. To see the essays that students write, whether in the genre of narrative, descriptive, analytical or researched papers, as stories suggests that the well-formed essay has a kinship with the well-formed stories. Also, if we ask our students to be invested in the essays they write, then approaching these essays as stories that our students are writing bridges the gap between non-academic "writing" and the writing we ask them to do in the composition classroom.

I turn to specifics example from my composition classroom, recognizing that it only represents one possibility of how narrative agency can be fostered in that context.[2] In all of these examples, the students seem to be struggling with the telling of stories that they do in outside of the composition classroom and the genre of writing that they are being exposed to in the composition classroom. In response to an assignment asking the students to choose an argument from a movie to defend or argue against, Toufu, a Korean student whose parents were first generation immigrants, chose the movie, Zoolander. The argument he identified in this movie was that child labor in third world countries is a bad economic and political move. In class, he talked about how he had always been asked to work to help his family. It seemed to him that in his culture, there was less of a negative stance on child labor than routinely taken by American media. However, when I received the paper he had written on this subject, he had taken the position that child labor was bad--a complete turn around from what he was saying in class--and backed it up with research. I asked him about this, and he said, "I didn't know I could tell my own opinion in an academic essay." He asked if he could rewrite this paper and I said yes. He then turned in a paper that spoke about his own experiences having to work afternoons and weekends "in the hot Texas sun" at a flea market with his parents since he was five years old. But instead of complaining about this, he said that this experience had taught him work ethics, and that his culture believed that work, and not just academic success, would provide him with the discipline that he needed to do well in life. He wrote that he recognized traditional criticisms of child labor, but that he thought sometimes Americans went too far to protect children from having to do real work and that he thought it was somewhat jarring for these children growing up to be suddenly thrust in the academic workplace. The story that he was telling in class, which he at first thought he did not have permission to tell, made his argument interesting and nuanced.

Another student, Navdip, in response to the same assignment, talked in class about the movie Rounders. He wrote a journal entry on how the movie was arguing that gambling could be a beneficial and lucrative endeavor, and backed it up with his own experiences gambling. He then wrote a paper saying that exact opposite--he argued that gambling had its highs and lows, but ultimately was dangerous and not profitable. He wrote, "The house always wins." When I received the paper, I didn't ask him why he had changed his position. I didn't ask him why his story had changed. Nor did he rewrite the paper like the other student did. But on the last day of class, I told him that I was surprised by his argument, and he told me that he was unsure what he believed. He said that he didn't know if it was appropriate in an academic context to defend gambling. He said that he sometimes thought gambling paid off, especially when he was on a winning streak, but when he was losing, his perception of the benefits of gambling changed. His story, and ultimate argument, seemed to depend on the way he perceived the act of gambling itself.

The final example I will give is of a student, named Charles, who only came to class a few times. During the few times he came, he had a habit of making fun of one of the Asian students in class who spoke broken English. I challenged him on this one day, and he replied defensively that he denied making fun of this student. Charles then continued not to come to class. However, on the last day of school, he returned. I had assigned the students a creative project, which entailed doing anything creative (a poem, short story, etc) and then finding the argument in this creative act. He told me, although he had missed the day that the students had presented their creative projects, that he wanted to present his. He, and a friend of his, commenced a short skit that had him playing a Nigerian professor who spoke in a very thick accent. The student, played by his friend, then started to make fun of this professor. The skit ended with their pretending to be in a physical fight. At the end of the skit, Charles said that the argument that the skit made was that it is not right to make fun of people from other countries that do not speak well. I remembered his behavior in class, which he had denied doing just that, and I asked him if he truly believed this, or was just saying it for my benefit. Surprised, he said that he was thinking about what I had said and that he started to think about an experience he had in high school. He said that his parents were from Nigerian, and that one of their friends from church had come in to substitute a math class he had. The teacher spoke in a heavy accent, and the other students in his class had made fun of this teacher. He had gotten very angry with this, but had not said anything at the time. He said that my comment, although at the time made him defensive, had reminded him of this experience. The story that he remembered then influenced the eventual argument he would make.

One classroom exercise I tried in my composition classroom was designed to encourage students to examine the different stories that we tell. This assignment involved finding articles from differing perspectives on the war in Iraq. Over the course of the semester, I had recognized that my students were in overwhelming support of this war. We discussed articles for them to read about professors who have been silenced or fired for speaking against the war, and editorials that argued for and against the military action in Iraq. The discussion that ensued as a result of these different stories was interesting. Some students talked about people they knew who had returned from fighting in Iraq, and how they were having trouble adapting to civilian life. Others talked about the way in which American media portrays the war as opposed to the international media. One student said that he had lived in Iraq for a year and that in his opinion, the Iraqi population didn't understand what we were trying to do. Another student said that they didn't understand why we were in the first place, while another student countered that now that we were over there, it would be a bad idea to just pull out. The conversation that the students had been having--the story that they were telling before--had turned. Now, the discussion was nuanced and interesting; it delved into the gray area of the military situation we are currently faced with.

In all these examples in my own composition classroom, the position that my students took depended on the stories that they were telling outside of the academic context. Thus, I argue, when asking our students to write essays, we must recognize the how the story telling that our students do outside of class intersects with the writing that they do in the classroom. I also have argued that the Bakhtinian concepts of polyphony of voices, chronotopes and dialogism provide a different language for understanding what students are doing in the composition classroom. If we are to encourage "story-telling" in our classroom, then an application of these Bakhtinian concepts to narratives in general would be useful. I suggest that a further explication of Bakhtin's concepts, and how these concepts may already support what we are trained to do in the composition classroom, can help bridge the gap between the story-telling our students already do outside of the academic context and the writing that we ask our students to do in an academic context.

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[1] Many in narrative psychology and literary theory use Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics to understand how Bakhtin identifies the many voices in Dostoevsky's novel in relation the author and other characters and how the Russian novelist exemplifies the Bakhtin's "dialogism."

[2] In a longer version of this paper, I would give more examples from my experience that possibly reflect narrative agency, and try to receive permission to use these examples in my paper.