Monday, August 27, 2012

Boice Response: The Conversation

When I entered the Honors College at UCA, one the things they gave me was a username and password to get onto an online forum. When I logged on, I found a thread where several past and present members of the college had posted introductions. Almost all of them made reference to "continuing the conversation" and through out my time at UCA "the conversation" was often talked about in this abstract way. I was told that "the conversation" happened everywhere: on campus, off campus, online. It was strange. I wasn't sure what the conversation was about or whether I wanted its omnipresence to follow me back to my dorm room. After going through the program, I am still unsure if I was ever a participate in "the conversation," though I did make many friends in the program and we talk all the time. We even picked up on some of the language that was used in the classes particular to Honors, like "the self" and "the Other," but I am not sure if we entered an existing conversation or just incorporated Honorsese into our own everyday conversations.

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.

1 comment:

  1. 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.

    ryan

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