Dialogic Moments

"The vision of communication as authentic dialogue, as the mutual communion of souls, has animated many twentieth-century discussions of language and communication. In its diverse manifestations, both in scholarly writings and in various forms of vernacular culture, this communicative utopia has identified dialogue, or conversation, as a locus of authenticity of both individuals and groups. This study traces the ways utopian visions of communication have played themselves out in particular contexts of Israeli society through the twentieth century, encapsulating central trends in the evolving Israeli cultural conversation over the years.... In one sense, this book is a historically situated study of the cultural fluctuations of a given society in all its particularity. In another sense, however, it seeks to offer a more general statement about the culturally constructed nature of the quest for authenticity as a project of modernity by focusing on conceptions of communication and language as its quintessential loci." - From the introduction of Dialogic Moments by Tamar Katriel; "Tamar Katriel's study of dialogic moments is an impressive and ambitious tour de force about communication and culture in Israel during the twentieth century. It is insightful, well written, and draws sustained attention to ways of speaking and speech occasions as formative of national, cultural, and social lives. The book will be of keen interest to many readers including students of anthropology, communication, Israeli and Jewish studies, and sociolinguistics, among others." - Donal Carbaugh, University of Massachusetts; "Tamar Katriel is a brilliant scholar, and Dialogic Moments is an important work. It is consistent with the superlative quality of her earlier books on contemporary Israeli culture. Here too, Katriel takes an urgent topic, theorizes it with exceptional precision, tackies it with the best that ethnographic research can offer, and writes with clarity and passion. The book is tightly focused and nicely stuctured into three parts, one for each mode of communication that she examines - soul talks, straight talk, and talk radio." - Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, New York University, author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage"