Kind Of Dialogue Research Articles

CROSSING BORDERS: ECO-THEOLOGY IN THE SHADOWLANDS

The construction and effectual application of eco-theology must seriously engage the shadowlands, the places where borders have created inequities and injustice. In this liminal space, many aboriginal peoples have lived as mere shadows in their ancestral lands, marginalised by the nations that have colonized them. When the place of Christianity in a society’s public sphere is in flux, and it finds itself, at times, within the shadowlands, its relationship to other religious traditions, in-cluding Aboriginal worldviews, also encourages changes. What happens to Chris-tianity, particularly eco-theology, when it engages mostly earth-based traditions in this context? These encounters bring to the fore porous borders that have operated consciously or unconsciously in the past and point the way to a new kind of dialogue in the present. We contend that the answer to the above question is a key component in a meaningful eco-theology which finds its context in a pluralist nation. Other key components to be explored extend beyond theology to broader issues: one, of coming to terms with the effects of colonialism and the need to pay attention to trust in order to become effective allies effecting real ecological change; and two, the very practical need Christianity has to find an effective voice if it is not to be completely marginalised in a pluralist, post-colonial context. This article focuses on Christian engagement with Canada’s First Nations and Christian theology. Consideration of the following themes attempts to further a conversation regarding the future of Christian Eco-theology in a post-Colonial, pluralist context where Christianity often finds itself in much the same shadowlands as those who it colonized: the theoretic understandings of porous borders, a metaphor grounded in the porous non-containment of ecosystems themselves, the complex history of Christianity in the Othering of aboriginal peoples legally and geo-politically within Canada, and the contemporary theological implications – particularly in terms of salvation – for Christianity as it attempts to listen respectfully to the ecological insights of a people seeking agency within its own primal traditions, which are at the same time Christian-influenced. doi: 10.7833/111-1-24

CROSSING BORDERS: ECO-THEOLOGY IN THE SHADOWLANDS

The construction and effectual application of eco-theology must seriously engage the shadowlands, the places where borders have created inequities and injustice. In this liminal space, many aboriginal peoples have lived as mere shadows in their ancestral lands, marginalised by the nations that have colonized them. When the place of Christianity in a society’s public sphere is in flux, and it finds itself, at times, within the shadowlands, its relationship to other religious traditions, in-cluding Aboriginal worldviews, also encourages changes. What happens to Chris-tianity, particularly eco-theology, when it engages mostly earth-based traditions in this context? These encounters bring to the fore porous borders that have operated consciously or unconsciously in the past and point the way to a new kind of dialogue in the present. We contend that the answer to the above question is a key component in a meaningful eco-theology which finds its context in a pluralist nation. Other key components to be explored extend beyond theology to broader issues: one, of coming to terms with the effects of colonialism and the need to pay attention to trust in order to become effective allies effecting real ecological change; and two, the very practical need Christianity has to find an effective voice if it is not to be completely marginalised in a pluralist, post-colonial context. This article focuses on Christian engagement with Canada’s First Nations and Christian theology. Consideration of the following themes attempts to further a conversation regarding the future of Christian Eco-theology in a post-Colonial, pluralist context where Christianity often finds itself in much the same shadowlands as those who it colonized: the theoretic understandings of porous borders, a metaphor grounded in the porous non-containment of ecosystems themselves, the complex history of Christianity in the Othering of aboriginal peoples legally and geo-politically within Canada, and the contemporary theological implications – particularly in terms of salvation – for Christianity as it attempts to listen respectfully to the ecological insights of a people seeking agency within its own primal traditions, which are at the same time Christian-influenced. doi: 10.7833/111-1-24

The World After Progress: The Thomas Browne of W. G. Sebald

THE LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION of the German writer W. G. Sebald is noted for its novelty and strangeness, even, and perhaps especially, by readers of the English translations (Long 3-4). The work translated into English as The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage (1998) is doubly strange for the English reader because it is generated in part by reviving and recasting English genres of the seventeenth century, particularly those of natural history and anatomy, as formulated in English works by Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. To an interviewer from the Observer, Sebald described his astonishment at what he found in such works: It so happens that a friend of mine was in the process of translating into German--which is quite an impossible task--Aubrey's Brief Lives [1693], and he did it in the most brilliant way by inventing an artificial seventeenth-century German, and so I got more and more into reading seventeenth and early eighteenth-century English authors, and the density of the miraculous achievements is staggering. (McCrum 17) Sebald's reliance on and, in some instances, verbatim re-voicing of Browne's prose in The Rings of Saturn seems to exploit generic potentials not suspected or detected by recent writers of English, or at least not with the same breadth of cross-linguistic appeal. As well as a poet and fiction writer, Sebald was a literary scholar with the linguistic means and critical inclinations to take seriously and envision new relevance for what are otherwise considered to be historically exhausted forms of writing. An examination here of the generic potentials that Sebald liberates from the English and develops for his own German works leads to an important reassessment of these old genres and texts and of those by Sir Thomas Browne in particular. Consideration of Browne's genres and the uses to which are put in Sebald helps also to account for a difficult aspect of Sebald's work--its laughter--and the ways in which that laughter is produced in yoking seventeenth-century English to a sustained and entirely earnest critique of progress. By progress, I mean the Whig view of the past as inevitably leading to, and therefore legitimizing, present prevailing conditions, which are by this means projected into the future (Butterfield v). But whereas Butterfield was addressing historians and what he takes to be volitional ideological practices of historiography, his definition is augmented through the present reading with the assertion that the idea of progress is more or less seamlessly bound up with the historical process of secularization. I understand secularization as a displacement of the seventeenth-century Christian trajectory of history. Sebald's critique of progress is a productive effect of his recuperation of texts and genres that are not themselves scientifically modern but that helped to make available the identity and displacement of redemption with progress as the justifying telos of scientific modernity. The Rings of Saturn instructs us in how Thomas Browne locates and refuses the trope of progress, providing Sebald with a model of the generic process by which to locate his own critique. Genres, History, Laughter That a writer from outside the English language should recognize and activate Browne's genres for new uses in the twentieth- and twenty-first century is as it should be, according to M. M. Bakhtin's socio-historical theory of genre, which stresses the value of outsideness, of perspectives from outside a culture, and, in this case, outside the language, for recognizing generic potentials. Like all meanings, the fullest capacities of a genre only become apparent once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning and they engage in a kind of dialogue.... We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself ... and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths (Speech Genres 7). …

Heart Speaks to Heart: Women of the Book in Conversation

Muslim and Catholic teenage girls discussing dating and marriage . . . Jewish and Catholic women studying the Bible together . . . Jewish, Christian, and Muslim moms sharing kosher marshmallows. These are just a few snapshots of the conversations taking place between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim “women of the book” in Chicago. “People of the book” (ahl al-kitab) is a Qur’anic term Muslims use to describe religions centered on a revealed text, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Christians and Jews would not necessarily define themselves in this manner, but I have used the term “women of the book” in my title because it is a convenient way to group these three monotheistic faiths. “Heart speaks to heart” is the famous saying of Cardinal John Henry Newman that, I believe, captures the essence of the kind of dialogue that often takes place between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women. This article is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of all the dialogues between Jews, Catholics, and Muslims in Chicago. Rather, I will simply use broad strokes to describe some of the incredibly rich conversations that have been taking place here between “women of the book.”

The mathematical formatting of climate change: critical mathematics education and post-normal science

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of the 21st Century. Mathematics is involved at every level of understanding climate change, including the description, prediction and communication of climate change. As a highly complex issue, climate change is an example of ‘post-normal’ science – it is urgent, complex and involves a high degree of uncertainty. This kind of science requires the participation of citizens much more than traditional science. This implies a role for mathematics education in educating current and future citizens to contribute to the kind of dialogue that is needed. In this paper, I argue that critical mathematics education offers a perspective from which to conceptualise how mathematics teaching and learning might undertake this role, drawing in particular on the idea of the ‘formatting power’ of mathematics and the importance of reflective knowing in relation to the mathematics of climate change.

A different kind of dialogue? Messianic Judaism and Jewish‐Christian Relations

A different kind of dialogue?: Messianic Judaism and Jewish‐Christian Relations Yaakov Ariel In the 1970s, both Jews and Christians were surprised to see the rise of a vigorous movement of Christian Jews. Messianic Jews embraced the evangelical definition of Christians as people who undergo experiences of conversion or being born again, as well as evangelical manners of reading the Bible and evangelical codes of personal morality, but wished to maintain a measure of Jewish culture and identity. The same years were the heydays of Christian‐Jewish dialogue, which brought about a breakthrough in the relationship between the two faiths. Situated in a very different cultural and theological climate, Messianic Jews have engaged in a very different experiment in Christian‐Jewish relations that also signified a new understanding of the relationship between the two faiths, albeit in a very different manner than liberal Christians and Jews envisioned. Students of Christian‐Jewish relations in our time should therefore pay attention to the Messianic Jewish movement, which, like the dialogue, also signified a change of heart in relation to the Jews, this time among conservative Christians. Historical background and early years The roots of the new movement can be traced to Pietist and evangelical missionary ideology in the modern era that advocated the position that accepting the Christian faith did not stand in contradiction to Jewish identity but rather made it more complete. The evangelical premillennialist view that has considered the Jews to be the Chosen People has also served to offer justification for maintaining Jewish identity, customs, and symbols. There were attempts at creating communities of Jewish‐Christians in the nineteenth century, but such experiments were short‐lived. “Judaizing” had traditionally been considered heresy, and many expressed suspicion toward the idea of separate Jewish congregations. Converts too were often afraid of arousing suspicion that their conversions were not genuine and, as a rule, chose to join non‐Jewish churches. Attitudes gradually changed, and in the 1920s, the Presbyterian Church, USA, initiated the establishment of Jewish‐Christian congregations, intending them to serve as centers of evangelism among the Jews as well as communities where being ethnically Jewish was normative. The more assertive and independent movement of Messianic Judaism that came on the scene in the 1970s represented a new generation that possessed unprecedented freedoms of choice, including the amalgamation of traditions, which previous generations had considered alien to each other. This offered Messianic Jews a sense of mission as they felt that they were healing historical injuries. The new movement has attempted to create a young and exciting vision of Christianity that worked around traditional views of a faith alien to Jews. Evangelical Christian attitudes also changed and became more accepting toward ethnic pride and incorporation of symbols and customs from other traditions, such as Native Americans, although an amalgamation of the Christian faith and Jewish identity was, perhaps, even more daring. The war in June 1967, between Israel and its neighbors, also affected the manner in which evangelical Christians had come to view the Jews and their role in history, boosting the converts’ status, their pride in their roots, and their desire to maintain Jewish identity. In the first phase of the movement, Jewish converts to Christianity established congregations on their own initiative, which were largely independent of the control of missionary societies or Christian denominations. An early and central congregation, within the larger movement, has been Beth Yeshua in Philadelphia. In the late 1960s, Joe Finkelstein, a chemist and a Jewish convert to Christianity, gathered a group of Jewish teenagers who were looking for an alternative to their parents’ middle‐class environment, as well as a haven from the more dangerous aspects of the counterculture. The Christian‐Jewish communities demanded abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and premarital sex and encouraged their members to obey the law and work hard toward careers. Finkelstein initially brought the new converts to the Presbyterian‐sponsored Hebrew Christian center in downtown Philadelphia, but the young converts did not take well to the older Jewish‐Presbyterian congregation, viewing it as lacking in Jewish atmosphere, and they decided to establish their own congregation, which grew considerably. Messianic congregations serve as centers of evangelism with sermons promoting the Christian...

A different kind of dialogue?

CrossCurrentsVolume 62, Issue 3 p. 318-327 ARTICLE A different kind of dialogue? Messianic Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations Yaakov Ariel, Yaakov ArielSearch for more papers by this author Yaakov Ariel, Yaakov ArielSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 September 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-3881.2012.00243.xCitations: 2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume62, Issue3September 2012Pages 318-327 RelatedInformation

VII Receptions of Horace

The study of classical reception, the influence of classical texts and culture in later times and works, has been one of the biggest growth areas in classical scholarship in the twenty-first century. There has been considerable discussion of how classical reception is to be defined: for some orientation see Hardwick 2003, Martindale and Thomas 2006, and Hardwick and Stray 2008. Most would now view it as a kind of dialogue between classical original(s) and later work(s) which use, appropriate, or modify the original(s), and emphasize the need to understand both cultural contexts as well as remembering our own situatedness. When we look at, say, Ben Jonson's reception of Horace there are three contexts involved: ourselves in our own period and culture, Jonson in his, and Horace in his, and we are in effect reading Jonson reading Horace. In a sense, all that classical scholars do is a form of reception, as they are always inevitably receiving classical texts in the particular light of their own culture and characteristics, whether or not they articulate this explicitly. One strand of classical reception is connected with translation: a translation is never a neutral rendering of a text but is always necessarily coloured by the culture and ideology of the translator. Another is connected with literary imitation or adaptation: classical works can be very effectively recast in a new cultural context. As we shall see, Horace has been richly received in both these ways, and in others.

Об универсальных чертах сочинения

ON THE UNIVERSAL CHARACTER OF COORDINATIONSummaryThe two syntactic connections – coordination and subordination – differ not only in their form, but also in their meaning. Their meanings can be regarded from at least three aspects: logical, cognitive and communicative.Thus coordination and subordination are firstly correlated with the division of concepts and the definition of concepts, correspondingly. This difference is true for both word combinations and composite sentences. Secondly, the reversible coordination is correlated with the process of compari­son, the irreversible coordination with the process of observation, and the subordination with the process of making conclusions. Thirdly, the two kinds of composite sentences can be presented as the result of monologization of two different kinds of dialogues.

Argumentation Without Arguments

A well-known ambiguity in the term ‘argument’ is that of argument as an inferential structure and argument as a kind of dialogue. In the first sense, an argument is a structure with a conclusion supported by one or more grounds, which may or may not be supported by further grounds. Rules for the construction and criteria for the quality of arguments in this sense are a matter of logic. In the second sense, arguments have been studied as a form of dialogical interaction, in which human or artificial agents aim to resolve a conflict of opinion by verbal means. Rules for conducting such dialogues and criteria for their quality are part of dialogue theory. Usually, formal accounts of argumentation dialogues in logic and artificial intelligence presuppose an argument-based logic. That is, the ways in which dialogue participants support and attack claims are modelled as the construction of explicit arguments and counterarguments (in the inferential sense). However, in this paper formal models of argumentation dialogues are discussed that do not presuppose arguments as inferential structures. The motivation for such models is that there are forms of inference that are not most naturally cast in the form of arguments (such as abduction, statistical reasoning and coherence-based reasoning) but that can still be the subject of argumentative dialogue. Some recent work in artificial intelligence is discussed which embeds non-argumentative inference in an argumentative dialogue system, and some general observations are drawn from this discussion.

The will to (de)liberate: shaping governable citizens through cognitive behavioural programmes in school

Lately, a deliberative conception of democracy has gained influence in policy debates throughout Europe. Individuals are here seen to be fostered into responsible, mature – democratic – citizens by being involved in dialogue. In the 1990s, calls for ‘democratic education’ intensified in Sweden. This article analyses two pedagogical models influenced by programmes developed in the USA that have recently had a great impact in Swedish schools and elsewhere, Social and Emotional Training and Aggression Replacement Training, both teaching pupils the ‘art of democratic deliberation’. By analysing manuals and interviews with school staff, we find that both models are based on the idea that through constant dialogue, pupils develop a ‘democratic mentality’. Referring to Foucault, this kind of dialogue can be seen as a technology of confession, where pupils are encouraged to reflect upon themselves and their behaviour, abilities and qualities as a way to change themselves and become democratic subjects.

The Socratic Method and Legal Education

The introduction of the law school system necessitates many changes in Korean legal education. Law professors are grappling with the efficient and proper pedagogy for professional legal education. The Socratic Method is a pedagogy alternative to the existing passive lecture-format used in Korea. In spite of its long tradition in the United States, we began discussing the use of the method in earnest at about the same time as the introduction of the law school system. In the U.S, there are some criticisms leveled against the method from the proponents of professional skills training. Such criticisms are based on the need to have more practical education and the perceived side effect that the method creates a competitive mood in the class room. Law itself is characterized as a method to address disputes. Thus, the ultimate aim of legal education must be cultivating a legal mind. Discussion on the Socratic Method should be focused on this point. A dialogue is a key tool of the Socratic method. It helps students understand legal definitions and rules thoroughly. They develop the way to argue, persuade and prove points with reasoning. Law professors must prepare for a lecture carefully to make a dialogue genuine corresponding to original purposes. It is better to distribute some questions to students in advance so that they can prepare for a class. Law professors should find some positive points in students' answers, encourage their motivation for studying and prevent derailment of discussions to too remote places. What kind of dialogue is the real Socratic Method should be discussed incessantly and open to the changes of reality. Clinical and lawyering classes are advisable to reinforce the practical education. Without the changes in education substantially corresponding to the law school systems purposes, the inception of the law school system will be evaluated some day as a big waste of time and resources.

Social Work and Religious Diversity: Problems and Possibilities

After exploring reasons why social workers need to engage in a kind of dialogue with their clients' religious beliefs and values, this article offers “virtues” that are required for such a dialogue. It then takes up problems that religious convictions can create both for the client and for the social worker. To deal with the problems, the article concludes with the resources that religion offers the social worker both for dealing with clients and for her or his personal life.

Eucharist (or ‘The Lark Ascending’)

The story is told from the point of view of a mysterious ‘other’, who narrates the life of a Church of England Priest encountering a crisis of faith after a calamitous event has disturbed the habitual tranquillity of the Parish. At times, the story becomes a kind of dialogue between the Priest and this mysterious narrator, but for the most part is narrated with a ‘you’ voice. The technique inevitably and inescapably foregrounds the presence of the narrator, and invites the reader to question that narrator's identity to a greater extent than in either the third- or first-person (in the latter case, this identity is usually made explicit). In the case of my own story, this identity is the key to the outcome. If the reader is able to identify imaginatively with this narrator, then the technique can be very effective; if not, the reader can feel disenfranchised from the creative process. In short, if the technique works, the reader takes on the perspective of the character and is ‘invited into’ the text; if it fails, the voice becomes impenetrable and excluding.

A Deaf Knowingness

“Deaf.” How do we learn what we know about being deaf and about deafness? What’s the difference between “being deaf” and “deafness” as a particular kind of (non) hearing? Which would you rather be, deaf or blind: children commonly ask this question as they make their early forays into imagining the lives of people different from them. Hearing people cannot know what it is like to be deaf, just as deaf people cannot know what it is like to hear ... or can they? Finally, how can we tell fresh and authentic stories of “being deaf” and the state of “deafness” that disrupt our familiar—perhaps even caricatured—patterns of understanding? In this special “deaf” edition of M/C Journal we wanted to create a body of work in which deaf writers and thinkers would have their say. Mindful that "Deaf history may be characterized as a struggle for Deaf individuals to 'speak' for themselves rather than to be spoken about in medical and educational discourses" (Bauman 47), we were particularly keen to place the contributions of deaf writers and thinkers alongside the mainstream hearing culture. This is why we have chosen not to identify each writer in this edition as deaf or hearing, preferring to leave that biographical auditory detail to the writers themselves.

The Hermeneutics of the Causal Powers of Meaningful Objects

Much of the interest of critical realists in the hermeneutic character of social inquiry has been shaped by debates with critics. Critical realists insist that the meaningful character of societies does not exclude the possibility of treating them as objects that have causal powers and that these objects are more than the sum-total of their meanings. In what follows, I want to go beyond this debate. Working within critical realist ontology, the question I want to ask is what kind of hermeneutics is required for the study of the causal powers of meaningful objects. If hypotheses about the causal powers of such objects can be confirmed only in dialogues, then what kind of dialogues and with whom are necessary for the understanding of causal powers? The question of the interpretation of causal objects is not merely a methodological one. Social structures are ontologically different from natural ones, and the nature of our understanding of meaningful objects is in part dependent on the way we come to apprehend them in thought. I argue that the approach to the understanding of the causal power of meaningful objects that has emerged in the debate between critical realists and their critics tends to view the study of causal powers as a dialogue between experts in the service of a more democratic society. Against this view, I suggest an understanding of the study of causal powers as a dialogue between critical social science and the public, a dialogue that takes place in the public sphere.

Do Androids Dream of Anna Karenina?

Do Androids Dream of Anna Karenina? Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Editor and Publisher In an age where the classic literary masterpieces have lost their cache, who would have thought that a book series based in the classics of Western literature would be a publishing mega-success? Note: these classics are not your great-grandfather's classics, but no one seems to be complaining. In 2009, Quirk Books launched Quirk Classics, a series of books which aims—in the words of their mission statement—"To enhance classic novels with pop culture phenomena." The books in this series intermingle "the work of classic literary masters with new scenes of horrific creatures and grue-some action." Fortunately for the publishers, all of the works they blend are already in the public domain. Consequently, Quirk is free to publish them in whatever form they see fit—or perhaps more accurately, whatever form they see sales. And they do. The first volume in the series, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, released in April of 2009, has become wildly popular. According to the Guardian, in a little over a year, over 50,000 copies have been sold in the UK—and 600,000 copies in the US. In addition, a film version starring and produced by Natalie Portman is already in the works. A few weeks ago, the latest installment in the series, Android Karenina, was released. According to the promotional materials for the book, "As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the much more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya." However, as with the other novels in the series, the book then takes a decidedly postmodern turn by having the four "live in a steampunk-inspired 19th century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and airborne debutante balls." Leo Tolstoy believed that one could not add or delete sentences from his novels without a resultant change in meaning. One can safely assume that deleting large sections of the novel and replacing them with text from contemporary writer Ben H. Winters would probably horrify him. But even though Tolstoy would not see the blending of his classic as preserving in some way the meaning of his novel, others might. The contemporary critic Hans-Georg Gadamer believed that meaning is never exhausted by the intentions of the author—even if the author was Tolstoy. For Gadamer, interpretation of literary works from the past necessarily involves a dialogue with the present. One might argue then that "mashing-up" of classic voices from the past with ones from the present is the kind of dialogue that epitomizes the fusion of horizons that Gadamer believes is typical of productive understanding. By bringing Tolstoy into dialogue with present concerns and interests, the Quirk Classics are literally doing the cultural work necessary for understanding the past. Regardless of how these mash-up novels square up with their originals, they are bringing an entirely new audience to authors like Jane Austen and Tolstoy. What is also clear it that this new audience wants more of the present—and less of the past—in these classics. For example, the first novel in the series, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, was 85 percent vintage Austen. Readers however complained that this was too much Austen—that they wanted more zombies in the novel. Let the monsters multiply. Subsequent volumes correct this by straying further from the original. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009), for example, maintains the plot lines of the original as well as many of the more well-known passages, but also replaces much more of the original text than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Estimates put over 40 percent of this mash-up novel as new material, which Publishers Weekly says replaces vintage Austen dialogue with "monsters, vulgarity, and violence." Now that we know that people are interested in recombined classics, and that there is a legitimate way to make them dialogue in a significant way with present concerns and interests, why not expand efforts to mash-up the classics, particularly if we still believe that they are the centerpiece of a liberal education? Harvard...

The Theory Gap

Invited to consider “the relation between early Americanist work and theory” and how this relationship “can inform studies in later periods,” we considered two different projects. Taking “theory” in a universal sense, we could survey, categorize, and highlight the insights and innovations of the field. Such an approach—not unimportant—could usefully discern patterns and explore continuities and discontinuities with criticism from later periods. But an alternative project seemed more illuminating—namely, to consider the status of “theory” itself in relation to early American literary criticism. As we will argue, our “theory” is not quite that of other subdisciplines, and it is this unusual formation that in part explains not only the isolation this roundtable has been organized to address, but also a sense of dispersal in the field itself. Two domains have seemed of particular importance. Our interdisciplinary situation, such as it is, is profoundly overdetermined by our (often muted, often repressed) relationship to the field of history. This unspoken apprenticeship in the guild of History has been compounded by our particularly odd form of canonicity—specifically a weak, late, and partial canonization, resulting in a counter-canonical impulse that diminishes our theorization of textuality. Both of these factors remind us that the renaissance of early American studies occurred at roughly the moment when “theory” triumphed in the literary curriculum, and as something commonly called “cultural studies” seemed gradually to take its place. A clearer assessment of this situation, we hope, may at least help us figure out what kinds of dialogue can occur with other literary scholars.

Reorienting Deliberation: Identity Politics in Multicultural Societies

Many political theorists argue that cross-cultural communication within multicultural democracies is not best served by a commitment to identity politics. In response, I argue that identity politics only interfere with democratic participation according to an erroneous interpretation of the relationship between identity and reasoning. I argue that recognizing the importance of identity to the intelligibility of reasons offered in the context of civic deliberation is the first step towards the kind of dialogue that democratic participation requires.

Study on System Utterance of Suggestion to Promote User's Accepatance in Driving Environment

In this study, we aim at clarification of the factor that promotes an user's acceptance of suggestion from an interactive agent in driving environment. Our aim is to figure out how human beings accept the encouragement from interaction objects, and also which kinds of dialogues or action controls are necessary for the design of car navigation system which makes suggestion and requests to drivers. Firstly, we had an experiment for collecting dialogue between humans in driving simulation environment, then we analyzed the drivers' acceptance and evaluation for the navigators. As the results, we found that the presence and reliability of the navigator highly relate to the acceptance of suggestion from the navigator. When navigators were next to drivers, the rate of drivers' suggestion acceptance rose. However, the stress of drivers increased. In addition, based on the linguistic and acoustic analysis of the navigators' utterances, we found out some points of designing system utterance of suggestion to promote user's acceptance. We found that expressing the grounds of suggestions, showing the exact numbers, and the wide pitch ranges, all highly relate to the acceptance of suggestions.