Literature As Dialogue

Dialogue on Partition explores dialogic possibilities in Indo-Pak English novels on partition of India in 1947 and expounds upon the potential of art and literature to offer dialogue. The book locates the inherent individualities of voices of narrators, characters and writers of these novels, as promulgators of dialogue in the face of the contentious event of partition and post-partition conflict. The book shows how the authors of these novels objectify their religious stance and present a regional affiliation attributed to a shared existence in the subcontinent, while locating and dissecting shared symbols, regional fraternity, sufi and mystic eclecticism and diversity of heteroglot and polyphonic voices in the chronotopal space and time of partition. The objective of the book is to critique the role of Indo-Pak novels in propagating dialogue, thereby proposing ways of reducing fissures implanted in the psycho-social terrain of the inhabitants of the region by offering junctures within the literary domain. Thus, the book expounds upon how these novels may be perceived as tools of integration between sects, races and nations at large. It can aid in opening borders to shared art and literature which inherently engenders response and dialogue leading to possibilities of coalition and integration.

How is it that some texts achieve the status of literature? Partly, at least, because the relationship they allow between their writers and the people who respond to them is fundamentally egalitarian. This is the insight explored by members of the Åbo literary communication network, who in this new book develop fresh approaches to literary works of widely varied provenance. The authors examined have written in Ancient Greek, Táng Dynasty Chinese, Middle, Modern and Contemporary English, German, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. But each and every one of them is shown as having offered their human fellows something which, despite some striking appearances to the contrary, amounts to a welcoming invitation. This their audiences have then been able to negotiate in a spirit of dialogical interchange. Part I of the book poses the question: How, in offering their invitation, have writers respected their audiences’ human autonomy? This is the province of what Åbo scholars call "communicational criticism". Part II asks how an audience negotiating a literary invitation can be encouraged to respect the human autonomy of the writer who has offered it. In Åbo parlance, such encouragement is the task of "mediating criticism". These two modes of criticism naturally complement each other, and in their shared concern for communicational ethics ultimately seek to further a post-postmodern world that would be global without being hegemonic.

Never less than profound, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka's fierce and provocative contribution to the debate on multiculturalism brings together 19 iconoclastic essays on African, European, and American literature, culture, and politics. "Unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer".--New York Times

Using a novel model, this book investigates the psycholinguistics of dialogue, approaching language use as a social activity.

An examination of Carroll's books about Alice explores the contextual knowledge of the time period in which it was written, addressing such topics as time, games, mathematics, and taxonomies.

Joining the Dialogue offers an exciting new approach for teaching academic research writing to introductory students by drawing on communication ethics. Holding to the current view that academic writing means situating ourselves in a research community and learning how to join the research conversations going on around us, Joining the Dialogue proposes that how we engage in dialogue with other researchers in our community matters. We not only read, acknowledge, and build on the research of others as we compose our work; we also engage openly, attentively, critically, and responsively to their ideas as we articulate our own. With this in mind, Joining the Dialogue is geared to helping students discover the key ethical practices of dialogue—receptivity and response-ability—as they join a research conversation. It also helps students master the dialogic structure of research essays as they write in and for their academic communities. Combining an ethical approach with accessible prose, dialogic structures and templates, practical exercises, and ample illustrations from across the disciplines, Joining the Dialogue teaches students not only how to write research essays but also how to write those essays ethically as a dialogue with other researchers and readers.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, the major proponent of philosophical hermeneutics, reveals himself here as a highly sensitive reader and critic of the German literary tradition. This is not the work of a specialist as narrowly defined in the typical literary study. Although he is a master of the techniques of criticism, Gadamer always sees the study of literature as a fundamentally human activity where human beings, generation after generation, pose their questions to an encroaching darkness that threatens to rob them of their confidence in the meaning of life and death. Never pedantic or antiquarian, these studies show such literary giants of the German past as Goethe and Hölderlin as our contemporaries. Gadamer demonstrates his ability to achieve the creative interplay of literature and philosophy which, in isolation, easily degenerate into sterile academic games. Typical of this dialogue are essays on Rainer Maria Rilke, including an examination of a problem of punctuation in one of his poems. What would be, in less capable hands, one more solution to a literary problem, turns out to be one of Gadamer's creative approaches to the mystery of man's relation to time and death.

Writing Compelling Dialogue for Film and TV is a practical guide that provides you, the screenwriter, with a clear set of exercises, tools, and methods to raise your ability to hear and discern conversation at a more complex level, in turn allowing you to create better, more nuanced, complex and compelling dialogue. The process of understanding dialogue writing begins with increasing writers’ awareness of what they hear. This book provides writers with an assortment of dialogue and language tools, techniques, and exercises and teaches them how to perceive and understand the function, intent and thematic/psychological elements that dialogue can convey about character, tone, and story. Text, subtext, voice, conflict, exposition, rhythm and style are among the many aspects covered. This book reminds us of the sheer joy of great dialogue and will change and enhance the way writers hear, listen to, and write dialogue, and along the way aid the writers’ confidence in their own voice allowing them to become more proficient writers of dialogue. Written by veteran screenwriter, playwright, and screenwriting professor Loren-Paul Caplin, Writing Compelling Dialogue is an invaluable writing tool for any aspiring screenwriter who wants to improve their ability to write dialogue for film and television, as well as students, professionals, and educators.

If imagination is understood to be a human response to the self-revelation of God, what practical results might this have for the work both of literary criticism and theology? Both theologians and creative writers find human existence to be characterised by basic tension between freedom and limit, which accounts for a sense of 'fallenness', and which a dialogue between literature and Christian doctrine can do much to illuminate. Such a dialogue is worked out in studies of the poetry of William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch and William Golding.

Text of and reflection on the 1981 encounter between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, which featured a dialogue between hermeneutics in Germany and post-structuralism in France.