Overview
Dawn LaValle Norman is a Senior Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry in Melbourne, Australia. She joined ACU in 2017 after a Junior Research Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a Ph.D. in Classics at Princeton (2015). Her work focuses on Greek literature in late antiquity, especially the philosophical dialogue as a literary genre. She has published two books, the first on an innovative Christian dialogue writer (and imitator of Plato) named Methodius of Olympus, and the second on early Christian women philosophers. Her current project, with funding from the Australian Research Council, is on the role that the female voice plays in philosophical dialogues from Plato to Augustine. For more information, see www.dawnlavallenorman.com.
Research Focus
My project during the fellowship year at Cornell is to look at silence as a companion to speech rather than a repression of speech. The time period that will be my focus is the 1st-6th centuries CE, and thematic focus stems from the rhythms between speech and silence in the genre of the philosophical dialogue in Greek and Latin. Some silences are clearly moments of repression: for instance, when a female partygoer is not allowed to express her own witty riddles but needs them revoiced through a male (Plutarch’s Symposium of the Seven Sages). But other silences in dialogues are part of a chosen rhythm. Augustine shows himself in his dialogue the De Ordine encouraging silence as a mode of education for his students and himself, but silence in this dialogue gives way to external discussion. In contrast to this move from internal to external dialogue, Augustine soon came to leave off writing philosophical dialogues entirely, and turned instead to write a Soliloquy, a new sub-genre of the philosophical dialogue which moves dialogue to be entirely internal, taking place between aspects of the self. Augustine’s turn of the dialogue inward was later utilized in periods of enforced isolation—such as Boethius’ dialogue with internalized allegorical characters that served as a mode of therapy of his own reason and emotions, the famous Consolation of Philosophy, which Boethius wrote while under arrest. When was silence embraced—even when externally enforced—as a way of intensifying internal voices rather than curating complete internal silence? During the year at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, I plan on completing a study on voice and silence in Augustine’s De Ordine, as well as working to finish my monograph on the female voice in philosophical dialogues from Plato to Augustine.