Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies

the impoverished nature of the act itself, but also by Pozzo's continuing cries for help in the background which are alternately discussed and ignored by the pair. Vladimir and Estragon continue their idle discourse until Pozzo finally offers a tangible return for their efforts (51-52). Although the ethical complexity of the dramatic action in Beckett's masterpiece has garnered much critical attention, Mikhail Bakhtin's consuming interest in ethical action and response, or has not received widespread comment, especially among those in composition studies using Bakhtin as an authority. It is the intention of this article to foreground the issue of answerability, as it is found in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and as it could be found in the field of composition. To put myself on this ethical hook is to pursue an interest that occupied Bakhtin throughout his career. But to do so also runs counter to one of the chief paradigms governing the field (if we accept the idea that social constructionism characteristically avoids the ethical argument by positing an unexamined normative social order). In other words, social constructionism, it seems to many, has left our discipline waiting for answerability and having only Vladimir and Estragon's success. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.