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Dialogue With Evil, Alexander M. Sidorkin

Faculty Publications

This paper is a direct result of comments Dr. Barbara Thayer-Bacon gave me on one of my previous papers. I have been exploring possible implications of Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of dialogue and polyphony for educational theory. The assumption I borrowed from Bakhtin is that dialogue is the end and everything else in a means. In other words, Bakhtin seemed to reject any absolutes with the exception of dialogical relation. I thought, and still do now, that this is a very productive idea, and that dialogue understood as a relation can effectively describe something very central to human existence. Among other …