Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World

Table of Contents:
Contents Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introducing Dialogic Freedom 2. A Father Begs for his Son’s Corpse in the Iliad 3. Passion and Freedom in Dante’s Inferno 4. Deaf to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice 5. The Virtuosity of Satan in Paradise Lost 6. Shaping the Master’s Vision in “Benito Cereno” 7. The Grand Inquisitor’s Silent Christ 8. Goading a Reader of “In the Penal Colony”` 9. Freedom Under Impossible Conditions in Beloved 10. Freedom Under Construction in a Polarized World Appendix A: Theoretical Roots of Dialogic Freedom Appendix B: Discussion Guide for Teachers, Students, and Book Groups Glossary Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Sharon Schuman taught literature and interdisciplinary seminars at Deep Springs College, Willamette University, University of Oregon, and Oregon State University.

Review :
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. “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.”