Définition du mot dialogue (document en anglais)

Dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog in American English[1]) is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more ("dia" means through or across) people. Its chief historical origins as narrative, philosophical or didactic device are to be found in classical Greek and Indian literature, in particular in the ancient art of rhetoric.

While the dialogue was less important in the nineteenth century than it had been in the eighteenth, it was not extinct. The British author W.H. Mallock employed it successfully in his work "The New Republic," which was explicitly based on Plato's "Republic" and on the writings of Thomas Love Peacock. But the notion of dialogue reemerged in the cultural mainstream in the work of cultural critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Paulo Freire, theologians such as Martin Buber, as an existential palliative to counter atomization and social alienation in mass industrial society.

Contents

1 As literary and philosophical device

1.1 Antiquity and the middle ages

1.2 Modern period to the present

2 As theological and social device

2.1 Egalitarian dialogue

2.2 Structured dialogue

3 See also

4 Notes

5 References

6 External links

As literary and philosophical device

Antiquity and the middle ages

Dialogue as a genre in the Middle East and Asia dates back to the year 1433 in Japan, Sumerian disputations preserved in copies from the late third millennium BC[2] and to Rigvedic dialogue hymns and to the Mahabharata.

Literary historians commonly suppose that in the West Plato (c. 437 BC – c. 347 BC) introduced the systematic use of dialogue as an independent literary form: they point to his earliest experiment with the genre in the Laches. The Platonic dialogue, however, had its foundations in the mime, which the Sicilian poets Sophron and Epicharmus had cultivated half a century earlier. These works, admired and imitated by Plato, have not survived but scholars imagine them as little plays, usually presented with only two performers. The Mimes of Herodas give us some idea of their scope.

Plato further simplified the form and reduced it to pure argumentative conversation, while leaving intact the amusing element of character-drawing. He must have begun this about the year 405 BC, and by 400 he had perfected the dialogue, especially in the cycle directly inspired by the death of Socrates, and is considered a master of the genre. All his philosophical writings, except the Apology, use this form.

Following Plato, the dialogue became a major literary genre in antiquity, and several important works both in Latin and in Greek were written. Soon after Plato, Xenophon wrote his own Symposium; also, Aristotle is said to have written several philosophical dialogues in Plato's style (none of which have survived).

Dialogue is formed by the two words 'dia' and 'logos', which can be literally interpreted as 'dual meaning' or more appropriately the 'two way flow/exchange' of meaning, which is the tone suggested by Boehm, and many modern philosophical (and management) writers.

Modern period to the present

Two French writers of eminence borrowed the title of Lucian’s most famous collection; both Fontenelle (1683) and Fénelon (1712) prepared Dialogues des morts ("Dialogues of the Dead"). Contemporaneously, in 1688, the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche published his Dialogues on Metaphysics

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