Research Catalog

Title

Resisting dialogue : modern fiction and the future of dissent / Juan Meneses.

Author

Meneses, Juan

Publication

Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2019]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xv, 270 pages : illustrations; 22 cm

Summary

• "A bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent. 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. 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"--
• "Resisting Dialogue offers a critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent. The book investigates the presence of this depoliticizing maneuver in several modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary novels from the English-speaking world and, at the same time, explores the creative power of those novels to resist it. By analyzing literary works produced in the span of almost a hundred years, Resisting Dialogue establishes a genealogy of this phenomenon and connects it to the deployment of consensus as a disciplinary regime in the current, post-political moment"--

Alternative Title

Modern fiction and the future of dissent

Subjects

• POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory
• Fiction > Social aspects
• Dialogue in literature
• PHILOSOPHY / Political
• Literature and society
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Politics and literature
• Fiction > History and criticism

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Note

• Prologue: Reading Dangerously Introduction: Resisting Dialogue 1. Impasse: Cosmopolitanism at the End of Empire 2. Contra I: A History of Silence 3. Deflection: Neoliberalism and the Affective Regulation of Citizenship 4. Contra II: Terrorist Counters 5. Reframing: Visualizing Environmental Violence in the Anthropocene Epilogue: Arguing On.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Prologue: Reading Dangerously -- Introduction: Resisting Dialogue -- 1. Impasse: Cosmopolitanism at the End of Empire -- 2. Contra I: A History of Silence -- 3. Deflection: Neoliberalism and the Affective Regulation of Citizenship -- 4. Contra II: Terrorist Counters -- 5. Reframing: Visualizing Environmental Violence in the Anthropocene -- Epilogue: Arguing On.

Call Number

JFD 20-3907

ISBN

• 9781517906757
• 151790675X
• 9781517906764
• 1517906768

LCCN

2019009072

OCLC

1091585582

Author

Meneses, Juan, author.

Title

Resisting dialogue : modern fiction and the future of dissent / Juan Meneses.

Publisher

Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2019]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Form:

Online version: Meneses, Juan, author. Resisting dialogue Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2019 9781452959818 (DLC) 2019021708

Research Call Number

JFD 20-3907