On Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought

In a wonderfully stimulating inquiry, Grudin investigates dialogue at all levels-between friends and lovers, in the classroom, the give-and-take of political discourse, in the artist's feedback loop with his or her evolving creative product. Defining dialogue broadly as an evolutionary process in which the parties are changed as they proceed, the author, who teaches literature and humanities at the University of Oregon, looks as well at the mind's dialogue with itself, journal-keeping and patterns of dialogue and self-inquiry in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Martin Buber's I and Thou, Henry James's Daisy Miller, Rabelais and Montaigne. He also scrutinizes the paintings of Pieter Brueghel and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, court painter to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who deconstructed imperial power in composite portraits depicting faces made of fruits and vegetables. Proposing that humanity is in constant dialogue with its tools, artifacts, inventions, texts and symbols, Grudin considers the suppression of the free flow of information under communist tyrannies and maps Western scientists' probe of nature's workings. The open-ended structure of this adventurous essay compels a dialogue with the reader, forcing us to let go of fixed perspectives. (June)