This book describes many different and useful ways of understanding personal relationships from a dialectical perspective. It is written for scholars in higher education, both faculty and students, across many fields within the social sciences and the humanities who seek answers to questions about how people relate to one another. The book is valuable for all scholars who pursue new ideas because it models a form of scholarly communication in which:
* multiple voices can be acknowledged as valid;
* the worth of one perspective is not measured by the denigration of another; and
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This book draws on the dialogism of social theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to develop a new approach which the authors term "relational dialectics" to the study of interpersonal communication. Emphasizing a social self instead of a sovereign self, multivocal oppositions instead of binary contradictions, and indeterminate change instead of transcendent synthesis, chapters examine and critique prevailing approaches to interpersonal communication. Building on these theoretical foundations, the volume rethinks such key areas as relationship development, closeness, certainty, openness, communication...