Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent

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A bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent, examined through several modern, postmodernist, and contemporarynovels from around the world for the last 100 years.

Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address. This 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, revitalise the practice of emancipatory politics.

Reviews

"Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancire and Slavoj iek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite postpolitics as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity."Grant Farred, Cornell University

"Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quothese immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political."Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic

"In all, Resisting Dialogue will be immensely useful for those conducting scholarly work in global studies across the disciplines, especially in the twentieth- and twenty-first century literary studies."Project Muse

"In attuning us to examine with greater sensitivity the political contours of dialogue... Meneses makes a genuinely original,impactful contribution to the study of the novel, as well as to political discourse and theory. "American Literary History

"Meneses changes the terms of a larger cultural debate about dialogue to reframe what is actually happening as the illusory manipulations of postpolitical power... in doing so, he demonstrates a promising correlation between reading imaginative texts and reading the world."MFS Modern Fiction Studies

"Resisting Dialogue is a crucial meditation on our fraught times of ever-deepening social, cultural and political divides, where all attempts at dialogue seem to be failing."LSE Review of Books

Author Bio

Juan Meneses is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.