Dialogue

Dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog in American English) is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more ("dia" means through or across) people. Its chief historical origins as narrative, philosophical or didactic device are to be found in classical Greek and Indian literature, in particular in the ancient art of rhetoric.

While the dialogue was less important in the nineteenth century than it had been in the eighteenth, it was not extinct. The British author W.H. Mallock employed it successfully in his work "The New Republic," which was explicitly based on Plato's "Republic" and on the writings of Thomas Love Peacock. But the notion of dialogue reemerged in the cultural mainstream in the work of cultural critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Paulo Freire, theologians such as Martin Buber, as an existential palliative to counter atomization and social alienation in mass industrial society.

Read more about Dialogue:  As Theological and Social Device

Famous quotes containing the word dialogue:

    When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
    Ernest Becker (1924–1974)

    The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.
    Harold Bloom (b. 1930)

    You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren’t dying. They’re merging into big conglomerates.
    Erma Bombeck (b. 1927)