![]() | Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent Subjects: Literature and society; Dialogue in literature; Politics and literature; Fiction -- Social aspects; Fiction -- History and criticism; A bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent
Meneses investigates how "illusory dialogue" (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls--instead of fostering--articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years--from E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson's The Passion to Indra Sinha's Animal's People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today's globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the "war on terror," and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics. Juan Meneses is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. |
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