The Future of Dialogue: The Future of Dialogue No 41

At the heart of this issue of new formations is a collection of essays on the role of dialogue in contemporary cultural theory. From Bakhtin to Habermas, dialogue and dialogism have been crucial to the attempt to imagine new forms of political community, forging new links between questions of aesthetics and the institutions of modern public life. Attempting to assess dialogue's political future, the essays gathered here examine the legacy of the concept's Romantic genealogy, its status in postmodern fiction and theory, and in African American poetics, together with problems of dialogue raised in the writings of Bakhtin, Habermas, and de Man. Other topics addressed in this issue include: the poststructuralist politics of universalism; a critique of Judith Butler's analysis of gender formation; queer subjectivity; World War I and postmodern memory; trauma and detective fiction; and secularism in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children".