The Good and the Bad of Language

Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel" was another difficult concept to understand shortly after reading Derrida's "Differance." Bakhtin covers a number of aspects throughout his essay, including the stylistic life of discourse in the novel, as well as the unities of the novelistic whole. Furthermore, Bakhtin discusses ideas like internal dialogization, stratification, and the fact that language is heteroglot. One of the most important ideas Bakhtin traces on is the idea of understanding and response through language and how they are dialectically merged.
In comparison to Bakhtin's ideas, Burke's "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'" looks further into actually speeches from Hitler and uses some of Bakhtin's ideas to discover the meaning behind some of Hitler's speeches.

Bakhtin says, "the novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized." This statement can directly relate to the types of speeches Hitler gave. Although Hitler was not a novelist, he did use social speeches in order to talk about the diversity of individuals, and although we may not agree with these statements he made against Jewish people, we cannot state that Hitler was not fluent in the art of rhetoric.

For the idea of internal dialogization, Bakhtin believed that all language was dialogical. Meaning, that all words uttered by any one person will always exist in response to something that someone has said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in the future. I believe the term internal dialogization is more prominent in the author of a novel because the author speaks to himself when writing and the actual permanent writing on paper is the response to what the author is saying and therefore the actual writing is waiting for the response of the reader.

Bakhtin also uses the term stratification in his essay, which I believe can be directly traced into Burke's "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle.'" Stratification is the relative social position of persons in a given social group, category, geographical region or other social unit. Whereas Bakhtin states that stratification widens and deepens as long as language is alive and developing, Hitler used stratification as a way to "weed" out the masses and use language to develop death instead of life. Hitler uses language to move social positions of persons lower and into an entirely different social unit than what they were considered prior to Hitler's reign.

Overall I believe that both essays are trying to show the different ways in which language can affect humans. Whereas Bakhtin speaks for the positive stylistic side of language, Hitler used a more forceful and immediate side of language.