In the last day or so, I’ve put up on my unbook site the first few fragments in a collection of further thoughts about dialogue not included in my Master’s Thesis, “The Fifth Principle of Dialogue”. I’ve called this collection “Fragments of Dialogue” and will be recovering sections that were cut out of my thesis, but which are still part of the work as well as what led to and came out of the work.
Beginning with a few fragments, I will continue to add to this over time as I go through the material. I had quite a lot of material that didn’t make it. Mostly, I just ran out of time and started cutting things that weren’t done yet or things I had already more or less mentioned before but on which I had more to say. There’s almost as much that I took out as ended up in. In fact, although I didn’t completely flesh it out, I’d envisioned three parts of which the material in my thesis was really only part one. Although part three in that vision was very rough even in my thinking and the least complete, I had quite a bit of part two fleshed out. All the thoughts that I had done something with beyond envisioning, I hope to put up as part of this addendum over time.
Some of this additional material is enhanced recapitulation of older material but there is new work and understanding there. By the time that I got to my thesis, I’d been actively writing about these thoughts for almost five years already. Quite a bit of the foundation for my thesis can be found in my earlier undergraduate work at Evergreen and woven in and out of the papers I wrote throughout my graduate program at Antioch. (I put quite a bit, but not all, of that earlier work up on my academic pursuits page.)
Anyhow, check out that new, and ongoing, collection of thoughts about dialogue if you’re interested.