Dialogic rhetoric, coauthorship, and moments of meeting

Distinguishing three concepts of dialogue, we describe a dialogic approach to rhetoric that conceives rhetoric as coexperiential, collaborative, constitutive, open, expansive, and both traditional and radical. Further, we offer an emergent approach to studying dialogic rhetoric that draws on both rhetorical criticism and discourse analysis. We then review briefly four empirical projects in which we have studied conversational dialogue or dialogic rhetoric, including a series of studies of the 1957 dialogue between Martin Buber and Carl Rogers, as well as other conversations involving Gregory Bateson, B. F. Skinner, and Rush Limbaugh. We conclude by identifying the implications of our work to scholarship related to the conversations we have studied, to communication theory and practice, to the facilitation of public dialogue, and to the study of dialogic conversations.