ABSTRACT:This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of "orality." Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to "invisible" social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of aesthetic judgment that endure into the present. Through examining two late Victorian novels specifically panned for their attempts to include talk's embodied situatedness into dialogue—George Meredith's One of Our Conquerors (1891) and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901)—this essay motivates a prior literary historical moment (before dialogue's definitive separation from talk) to consider a continuing verbal bias in our own critical and creative practices. This essay speculates that an embarrassment about embodied procedures continues to underlie our sense of dialogue as a less sophisticated narratological category, and that "best practices" in creative writing problematically erase the body when mandating that dialogue must show interiority or further novelistic action. Ultimately, unlike "orality," talk compels a confrontation with dialogue that brings attention to historical and present ways in which the notion of speech is inseparable from the power dynamics of embodied relation.

中文翻译：

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维多利亚晚期小说、糟糕的对话和谈话

摘要：本文认为，自从 19 世纪晚期小说艺术辩论中拒绝模仿现实主义以来，对话和谈话之间的分离已经被强制执行。此外，自德里达以来，形式主义方法的制度化和后结构主义都导致了对任何“口头性”类别的本体论断言的持续怀疑。然而，以后结构主义的复杂性为名失去的是将谈话视为一种具身的、关系的和社会学中介的形式。这篇文章认为，从这些元素的角度重新审视对话——从手势和其他生理产物到“无形”的社会动态——展现了审美判断的伦理维度，这种维度一直持续到现在。通过检查两部维多利亚晚期小说，特别是因为他们试图将谈话的具体情境纳入对话——乔治·梅雷迪思的《我们的征服者之一》（1891 年）和约瑟夫·康拉德和福特·马多克斯·福特的《继承者：一个奢侈的故事》（1901 年）——这篇文章激发了先前的文学历史时刻（在对话与谈话明确分离之前）来考虑我们自己的批判性和创造性实践中持续的口头偏见。这篇文章推测，关于具身程序的尴尬继续构成我们将对话视为一个不太复杂的叙事学类别的基础，并且当要求对话必须表现出内在性或进一步的小说动作时，创意写作中的“最佳实践”有问题地抹去了身体。归根结底，与“口头表达”不同，