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The deportment of discussion

#40: Nov. - Dec. 2007 (Non-Fiction)
MadArchitect

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The deportment of discussion

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Under normal circumstances -- meaning, a book divided into a reasonable number of sections -- a prefer that we match our threads to more or less the framework provided by the book: one thread per chapter, and then additional threads cropping up whenever discussion starts to veer away from the subject of those chapters. Having read the intro and the first couple of chapters, however, I'm thinking that may result in confusion with this particular book.

It isn't that Arendt is incapable of sticking to a theme or thesis in her writing -- she's almost fiercely determined to get to the heart of most topics she addresses. But in the course of talking about any given thing, she's liable to raise a number of other really interesting issues, and I'm not sure how we can feel comfortable delving into those avenues in within the confines of a thread that is ostensibly "about" the central issue of any particular essay.

So what I'm going to encourage is that people start threads when they see fit, and that they make those threads pertinent to whatever point of interest strikes them as they're reading. The best plan may be start each thread with either a question inspired by something you've read in the book, or by responding to some claim made by Arendy or the book's editor. I'm not going to demand that anyone conform to any particular guideline, though. All I do ask is a) that you make the title of your thread clearly indicative of what topic you intend to discuss, and b) that in the opening post of each thread you indicate what part of the book brought that topic to the table -- which you can handle by quoting text, or providing a chapter number or title, or a page number, or whatever. You need not go into a vast amount of detail; just make sure people know what part of the book you're talking about.
If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed. -- Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus"
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