This dialogue is designed as a multi-linked site organized around a constellation of topoi, each with its own icon. In addition to concretizing the dialogue's overarching theme of "the commonplace," this plan serves a couple of other purposes. The first is flexibility, giving the reader the option of moving straight through the interview or jumping from site to site (cite to cite). This approach also seeks to mirror the associational method of Professor Christensen's work: On the first page of his first book, he acknowledges his faith that by "relatively necessary train of associations, one could get from the Preface of Observations on Man to a conclusion on Coleridge's prose." The hope is that this dialogue can give a similar sense of movement, somewhere between the necessity of deduction and the happy surprise of good conversation. The text itself is a substantially revised transcript of a dialogue that took place in June of 1999.

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