Abstract: The ideal of ‘conversation’ recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice deemed central to ethics, democratic politics and thinking itself. This talk—which articulates core claims of my first book, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023)—surveys the promiscuous, alluring career of ‘conversation’, then spotlights its invocation in responses to skeptical doubt about the reliability of our understandings of ‘reality.’ I argue that there are striking correspondences in the uses of ‘conversation’ made in exemplary works of fiction, as well as in the ethical thought of Stanley Cavell and the democratic theory of Hannah Arendt. According to this outlook, conversation is an aesthetic performance. It does not merely take place between speakers in a world, but instead generates their shared world through an iterative relay between constraint and openness, normativity and improvisational freedom. These features of conversation are key to its suitability for addressing ethical and political concerns provoked by skepticism, from uncertainty about how to respond to ‘other minds’ we cannot know, to the demands of democratic politics unmoored from shared ‘truths’ and ‘facts.’ I further argue that a clarified understanding of this shared outlook on conversation yields a world-affirming model for interdisciplinary criticism. The talk concludes by proposing this account of interdisciplinary, conversational criticism as a route forward for contemporary literary studies, widely described as mired in ‘methods wars’ and existential tensions between aesthetic formalism, political or ethical commitments, and historical precariousness, which reflect the imperiled warrant of humanistic inquiry writ large. In short, the talk argues that a clearer view of the ideal of conversation offers timely resources for overlapping political, ethical, and disciplinary concerns.
Bio: Erin Elizabeth Greer is an associate professor of literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her writing and teaching bring together post-Romantic British and Anglophone fiction, ordinary language philosophy, ethical and political theory, feminist thought, and critical new media studies. Her first book, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation, was published in December 2023 by Edinburgh University Press. She’s in early stages of a new project interweaving studies of works of fiction and philosophy that seek to reimagine ‘justice’ to meet challenges of the 21st century, in which the fates of human and nonhuman entities are entangled in conditions that strain inherited moral, political and legal frameworks.