Boice and his students speak to my confusion about what "the conversation" is and where it is happening. Looking back, I can see that "the conversation" is not something that I can simply find, but something that I have to, in part, create. What I was able to learn at UCA and which is reiterated by Boice is that there are many different conversations going on in academia, in the public sphere, and within ourselves. Honors tried to teach us that if we could learn where these conversations talked passed each other and get them to talk to each other then we could make a contribution to each of those conversations. The term "the conversation" only stress the idea that through interdisciplinarity and cosmopolitanism we can talk over the walls of academic discipline, national boundaries, or ideological differences, not that there is a single conversation that follows students of the UCA Honors College.
Boice reminds me that when I write inspiration or my muse are not simply going to come and reveal themselves to me. They are products of cultivating an interest. Like the poetic muse, when I first heard it talked about I thought "the conversation" was a ghost of writing fortune. I thought it was something that was just suppose to happen, but Boice reminds that "the conversation" is the metaphorical product of many conversations. He puts the focus of contributing to a conversation on the listening and reading parts of that interaction. In order to continue the metaphorical conservation, I must be an active observer to many actual conversations.
I think the "converation" is related to "discourse" and all that theory. I can dig it, mostly. But I really think idiolect is where language begins. If you can "call" out "in the wilderness" of the voiceless than you can start talking something that ain't jive.
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