FREEDOM AND DIALOGUE IN A POLARIZED WORLD - Tapa dura

"To see true dialogue as a way of allowing conflicting voices to hear and understand one another is to offer hope of some resolution in our current world of polarization and impasse. Sharon's book on Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World does just that, by taking us back to some great debates of literary art, like Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which dialogic freedom takes the liberating form of seeking out a continuum of layers of knowing, as Portia and Shylock fail to navigate a way of transcending the hostility and cultural deafness that holds them apart. This thoughtful book is timely in the best sense." -- David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago "In 1919, a dark year for Europe full of dire pronouncements on the `crisis of culture,' Mikhail Bakhtin began to develop an arsenal of precious philosophical ideas by which civilization might better live: intuitive empathy, dialogue, a carnival fearlessness and sense of the cosmic whole, the unfinalizability of consciousness. Over the next three decades he illustrated their dynamics through the literary genius of Dostoevsky, Goethe, Rabelais. Sharon Schuman's book adopts a similar technique. In successive chapters, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Toni Morrison provide the lens and morally textured background for the "life of an idea" that Schuman has fashioned out of Bakhtinian materials to address our present culture's crisis of freedom. It is a conceptual crisis peculiar to a free society (in Stalinist Russia, Bakhtin would have gazed on it in wonder). The two definitions Schuman considers foundational in the West-freedom as autonomy and freedom as enlightenment-must be supplemented by a concept less devoted to the static comfort zone of each person's individual rights and belief. Moving with the dissonant other, she suggests, is possible, interesting, and wise. Decision-making and freedom are both "two-sided acts." An outsiderly or "alien" view on things is essential to our own. As the reader gradually and gratefully comes to see, assimilating these insights through literature makes them not just politically relevant, but immortal." -- Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University

This book invites us to question our infatuation with freedom as autonomy and enlightenment and introduces a new concept: dialogic freedom. It presents riveting moments of decision in literature from Homer's Iliad to Morrison's Beloved, urging us to read for and with dialogic freedom, and inspiring us to feel freer by abandoning our polarized enclaves in order to see better from the perspectives of others.