The Root of Civil Conversation: Spenser with (and by) Himself

Abstract

hat is it that companions do? How do they pass the time? It may be quite enough just to travel together, or sit side by side under a tree and keep each other company. But often companions will converse, and when they converse, they are obliged to take turns. The word “conversation” first comes into the language as a description of a general sense of being in community, of participating in the texture of social life. Around Spenser’s time the sense begins to narrow toward specifically verbal exchange and familiar discourse, a usage that activates the word’s etymology, con-versare, differently: from turning together in a common direction, it becomes the collaborative back-and-forth of taking turns. There may be, to this arrangement, an air of easy exchange, the permissive, digressive sense of “conversational” often applied to Montaigne. But the word may also invoke the idealization of dialogue that John Durham Peters describes in his history of the idea of communication, Speaking into the Air: reciprocity in talk as “the summit of human encounter, the essence of liberal education, and the medium of participatory democracy.” These are the hopes that tend to inform present-day critical uses of the word, when we put ourselves in conversation with other texts, or put texts in conversation with one another. The conversation wemean is an ideally unhierarchical exchange of ideas, which borrows from the quotidian responsiveness of talk in person to overcome the constitutive estrangements and asymmetries of criticism—the