Description
Book SynopsisIn seven essays, this book offers a tour de force through those seven disciplines in the humanities that lately underwent a fundamental transformation. In order to apply “exact” scientific methods, these disciplines turned away from their very subjects— the understanding of the relationship or a dialogue that underlies the phenomena they are supposed to investigate. The revisionist approach in this book, based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, traces the search for common and specific grounds of the humanities, beginning with psychologism through hermeneutics and semiotics up to the present state of self-annihilation. As an alternative, the book seeks to define humanities as the examination of relationships, which offers an array of refreshing perspectives on each field discussed.
Trade Review“This engaging volume offers seven chapters with different perspectives on the ‘dialogic’ in the humanities, taking Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation and testing it from the perspective of seven different disciplines within the humanities. … This is a thought-provoking read for anyone working in the humanities now, although it does expect a reasonable degree of familiarity with Bakhtin, and it creates a strong argument for defining the humanities in terms of the relational and the dialogic.” —Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 55, No. 2
* Forum for Modern Language Studies *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Matthias Freise
Internal Dialogism of Russian Postmodern Literature – Polyphony or Schizophrenia?
Maria Andrianova
Between Socrates and the Stranger: How Dialogic Are Plato’s Dialogues?
Kryštof Boháček
Dialogic Method in Literary History
Matthias Freise
Towards a Dialogical Sociology
Michał Kaczmarczyk
Discourses in the Design of Cultural Artifacts
Klaus Krippendorff
Attachment Patterns in the Bi-personal Field
Reinhard Plassmann
Voices in Image. A Methodological and Theoretical Approach to the Dialogic Image of the Other with the European Image of China as an Example
Xiaojing Wang
List of Contributors
