Dialogues

Abstract

Abstract Opening with a consideration of the importance of the refusal to communicate in Kant’s account of the discourse of taste, this chapter examines quite how dialogic—and how oral—critical dialogues really are. It notices that recourse both to silence and to texts held by individual participants in dialogues is a recurrent feature in critical dialogue. It argues that this recourse is fundamental to the cultivation of authority within dialogue—the genre in which critical authority is explicitly contested. Its theoretical consideration of dialogue encompasses discussion of Platonic dialogue and its criticism, before moving to the examination of a number of examples from the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (Allan Ramsey, Clara Reeve, Friedrich and Dorothea Veit Schlegel, Eckermann, and Goethe). Later examples include work by Oscar Wilde (who was one of the central examples discussed in the Introduction) and Marcel Proust, but the main focus of the chapter’s conclusion is the revival of the dialogue form in New Historicist criticism.