The Rebirth of Dialogue

Bakhtin, Socrates, and the Rhetorical Tradition

James P. Zappen

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791461297
• eBook ISBN: 9780791484906
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Offers a fundamental rethinking of the rhetorical tradition as dialogue.

Dialogue has suffered a long eclipse in the history of philosophy and the history of rhetoric but has enjoyed a rebirth in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Buber, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Among twentieth-century figures, Bakhtin took a special interest in the history of the dialogue form. This book explores Bakhtin's understanding of Socratic dialogue and the notion that dialogue is not simply a way of persuading others to accept our ideas, but a way of holding ourselves, and others, accountable for all of our thoughts, words, and actions. In supporting this premise, Bakhtin challenges the traditions of argument and persuasion handed down from Plato and Aristotle, and he offers, as an alternative, a dialogical rhetoric that restructures the traditional relationship between speakers and listeners, writers and readers, as a mutual testing, contesting, and creating of ideas. The author suggests that Bakhtin's dialogical rhetoric is not restricted to oral discourse, but is possible in any medium, including written, graphic, and digital.

Table of contents

• The Rebirth of Dialogue
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Traditional Socrates: Dialogue, Rhetoric, and Dialectic
• 3. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Dialogical Rhetoric, and the Socratic Dialogue
• 4. Cultural Conflict and the Testing of Persons and Ideas in the Laches
• 5. Truth as Dialogic: Creating a Cultural Hybrid in the Protagoras
• 6. Dialogue as Carnival: Contesting Cultural and Rhetorical Practices in the Gorgias
• EPILOGUE. Dialogical Rhetoric in Print and Digital Media
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index