Language and Dialogue - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2022

Linguistic landscapes are useful tools to decipher language ideologies that regulate public spaces in society, helping us to decode the semiotic messages that those landscapes transmit. Urban spaces also reveal social practices that organize people’s lives and unveil social discourses that legitimize, approve, erode, or eliminate different linguistic varieties that struggle to survive. This article examines the use of (mock) Lunfardo, a Spanish urban variety spoken in the Rio de la Plata area, Argentina, in a sign posted by the Buenos Aires’ city authorities and the impact this sign had on social media. The results of the analysis show that appealing to Lunfardo as a symbol of identity failed to establish a conversation between parties within a separated, fractured society.

This article examines how “parasitical” political language can help explore a new understanding of oppositional opinions in a global context of political polarization. By parasitical political language, I refer to what speech act theorist J.L. Austin calls “infelicitous speech acts”, language that is used unsuccessfully. Jacques Derrida argues that these “incorrect” utterances can escape from an already determined context and extend to a more liberated kind of communication. To explore the potentially “positive” effect of parasitical language, this article examines the utterances of Hong Kong protesters prior to the 2020 US elections as infelicitous speech acts. Their radical political approach, surprisingly, spawned an anti-globalist activist subculture shared by protesters in other parts of the world.

This paper provides a Bakhtinian reading of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” in order to register the status of dialogue pertaining to questions of sexual coercion and consent in the wake of the #metoo movement. I identify two prominent discourses in the short story: feminist critiques of domination (perspectives that account for structural imbalances that tend to put men in a hierarchy above women) and sex-positive feminism (a worldview that promotes female sexual agency). These two discourses, this paper argues, are relevant to understanding why a collapse of dialogue ensues in the narrative. I then use “Cat Person” to propose a way of contemplating the contemporary media landscape as a generator of failed dialogue.

In her study of epistolarity and world literature, Bower (2017) observes that letters “travel easily” and so are an obvious form for writing about migration and transnational dialogue. From another perspective, however, the epistolary may contain an empty promise: letters, after all, are sometimes waylaid or mislaid, unsent or undeliverable. This paper investigates the epistle and epistolary conventions in two short stories by US migrant writers – Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” (1993) and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin” (1997) – in which dialogue across national borders is made impossible under extreme political circumstances. I argue that Danticat and Hemon undermine the dialogic writing that is a basic generic epistolary convention to caution against ignoring asymmetries of power in situations of forced migration.

Martin Amis’s London Trilogy constitutes a body of work that has variously been categorised as comic, satirical, or simply postmodern. Given these assessments, the present essay concentrates on forms and functions of dialogue in these novels to identify its use as a generic marker. What emerges is that – while individual passages of dialogue are demonstratively structured along conventional generic lines – their function is to temporarily mislead the reader into trusting those ostensibly univocal signals, and thus contributing to their undermining by the remainder of the text. Fusing divergent generic aspects together into a form that is here termed anti-comedy, and consistently establishing and undermining readers’ expectations is one of the central functions of dialogue in Amis’s London Trilogy, the essay claims.

This study examines the different institutional, disciplinary, and pedagogical factors that come into play when teaching literary works with the goal of fostering dialogue, understood in the sense of civic communication and tolerance. Drawing on an Action Research approach, the analysis probes a specific experience teaching the diverse English-language short story tradition in the Canadian and German university context. The results show that to maximize the potential of teaching literary works for nurturing dialogue, instructors must navigate among multiple and at times contradictory forces reflecting institutional and disciplinary teaching priorities, divergent conceptualisations of dialogue, theoretical incongruities, varied literary and critical traditions, and complex mediation techniques.

This article examines how speech centric legal and public policy interpretations of the U.S. First Amendment – which guarantees constitutional protection for the freedoms of speech, press, religion, and assembly, from government constraint – tend to significantly impede democratic political discourse in the public sphere. Among other problems, speech centricity diminishes the importance of listening, adding to the crises of polarization and demonization now fracturing public political discourse. By drawing upon dialogical theory, speech act theory, and theories of listening, the essay explores how a listening-based perspective on legal and policy conceptions of free expression could perhaps reinvigorate political discourse.

Following Bakhtin (e.g., [1999] 1984, 184), dialogue studies have assumed at least some form of parity between dialogic participants. But what happens when parity is significantly disrupted or lost entirely? In this report of cultural practice among the Hobongan living on the island of Borneo, I examine the results of lost parity on traditional Hobongan and Christian-influenced cultural practices. The Hobongan typically acknowledge the lack of parity and ignore it, or they accept the lack of parity and try to rejoin polyphony through conversion. Syncretism presents a more complex case because dialogue remains possible: both Hobongan and Christian-influenced practices are combined to avoid unpleasant dialogues.