Dialogues (Exit 9: The Rutgers Journal of Comparative Literature Book 7)

In One-Dimensional Man Herbert Marcuse identified the commodification of even the most radically anticommercial and antiauthoritarian art, and the most compelling evidence of the accuracy of his analysis occurred in 1984—the year that titles Orwell’s most famous novel—when Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”, a protest song directed against the Reagan Administration’s policies, was used in Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign. Gone, it appeared, was the subversive possibility of the utterance, overwhelmed by the adaptability of the capitalist mode of production.One wonders, however, if even in his worst nightmares Marcuse could have foreseen the vapidity of contemporary mainstream discourse. Official press conferences are ever more scripted affairs, as evinced by the confusion that erupts whenever a genuinely unexpected question is asked, as well as the obstinate refusal by the speaker to actually answer the question. Political shows in a debate format feature speakers loudly and irritably parroting the “discourse” of their respective camps without saying anything new.It would appear, then, that discourse has no immanent quality of its own, and is useful only for consumption. However, the dialogic nature of speech never fails in its ability to continuously counteract the forces that fix discourse and truth. The papers collected in “Dialogues”, the seventh volume of Exit 9, shed new light on the hidden truths and meanings of the texts they analyze, at the same time using the varying discourses of academic disciplines in new and exciting combinations. “Dialogues” begins with two papers that explore and problematize, in various dis- cursive ways, the very nature of dialogue. The volume then proceeds with a historical paper on the rise of dialogue in seventeenth-century England, moving on to four contributions that employ various combinations of postcolonial, gothic, speech-act, and Bakhtinian theories of dialogue to analyze literary texts. We believe that these readings generate new possibilities, both ideologically and methodologically, for literary and cultural analysis in the future.