Constructing Dialogue and Dialectics in Arguing to Learn in the Teaching, Learning, and Reading of Literature

This chapter begins with the opening quotation from Raymond Williams because there is no getting away from the fact that teaching, learning, reading literature, talking and writing about literature, and arguing are all essentially done through languaging. There is a series of terms that linguists, postmodern theorists, poststructuralists, discourse analysists, critical theorists, and others have used to describe the exploration of language and languaging in order to focus attention on meaning, social significance, and cultural import beyond the surface level. These terms include “unpacking”, “deconstructing”, “problematizing”, “critical discourse analysis”, “defamiliarization”, among others. While there are important theoretical and practical differences among the perspectives indexed by different terms, for our purposes we treat these terms collectively as an approach to dialoguing about literature. At stake in constructing a dialectical space as part of Dialogic Literary Argumentation are power relations.