Project 2: Dialogue
Length: 4-6 pp.
Weight: 10%
Peer Review: 3 Oct.
Due: 6 Oct.
Purpose & Scope
For Plato, the dialogue was a literary way of representing dialectic, the method of inquiring after the truth by seeking contradictions in different views. But even for the non-Platonist (one who doesn't believe in the search for absolute truth), dialectic can be a way of arriving at better understanding by using two views to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of both and perhaps to discover a third and better view.
This project will ask you to dramatize two of the perspectives related to your chosen issue. This dialogue will not be descriptive (the variety used to advance a story), but rather didactic. Didactic dialogue, which emphasizes ideas, is used as an end in itself in instruction, propaganda, and philosophical discourse; the participants may be imaginary characters, portrayals of real people, or portrayals of literary or historical characters.
Use this dialogue to explore situations, issues, and ideologies that are currently circulating in the rhetorical community you've chosen to focus on this semester. Use this occasion to dramatize (literally) what worries and concerns people, what they know (or think they know), what questions they ask (or need to be asking), what possibilities they might consider. Your task is not to arrive at any Answers or Solutions but rather to begin to frame the problems and commonplaces, the issues and the "topics," that make up this community.
Writing
Your characters should be asking each other questions that will open things up, not close things down. This will make the dialogue different from a lot of writing, which is supposed to conclude something. No conclusions are needed here! But at least one of the characters (and your reader) should understand something new, or realize something that they didn't before. At least two distinct perspectives should be represented in the beginning of the dialogue and that some agreement, synthesis, or new insight should be achieved toward the end--even if it's only a better understanding of what questions need to be asked or what the disagreement is.
Although the emphasis should be on the ideas rather than the characters, you should individualize your characters enough that they hold the different views in a realistic way. Make your characters represent important dimensions of the diversity within your community. Note: You cannot take the "easy route" by making one of your characters so obviously unpleasant, stupid, or inarticulate that no reader would want to identify with him or her.
Evaluation
You will be evaluated based on how well you set the scene (lay out the motive for discussion, introduce and differentiate the characters), develop your ideas (showing two or more worthy perspectives relating to issues that are important to the community, placing the dialogue between ideas as well as characters, and using examples. You will be required to resolve the dialogue: the conversation and encounter must reach closure and a new understanding or position must be reached. The dialogue will be presented using hanging indentation, single spaced (with double spacing between paragraphs), and well constructed grammatically and stylistically, using the fonts and faces given in the course stylesheet.