If a dialogics, inspired by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, were recognized as an art of discourse on the level of the arts of rhetoric and dialectic, it might shape a critical practice different from those governed by the more familiar arts. Tzvetan Todorov's recent essay on dialogic criticism and Merle Brown's account of F. R. Leavis's "collaborative exchange" in criticism contribute to the invention of such an art; further efforts to rationalize it seem desirable and possible in the present critical conversation
