Social Theories

Ong, Walter S. J. "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction." Villanueva 55-76.
Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." CCC 35.2 (1984): 155-71.
Porter, James. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 34-47.
Bruffee, Kenneth. "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" Villanueva 415-36.
Trimbur, John. "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning." Villanueva 461-78.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, and Stuart A. SElber. "Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage." Computers and Composition 24 (2007) 375-403.

This is officially (because I say so) one of those weeks when I have so much to say, I feel stifled in the attempt to say anything. By way of kickstarting myself, I'll arbitrarily begin with the Ong reading, guided only by the fact that I ended with him last week. Isabel's comment on my post really brought home my main feeling about Ong; he's just so damn persuasive. I find myself lulled by his attention to definite determiners and pronouns. Of course, I'm the obvious audience for this discussion, given the brainspace I dedicate to grammar these days.

I did manage to push past the impulse to bang the drum for more histories of readers as constructed by their texts by noticing the same issue brought to light by Ede and Lunsford: Ong's "major emphasis is on fictional narrative rather than expository writing" (Ede & Lunsford 160). I, too, felt a bit pushed around by Ong's claim that "what has been said about fictional narrative applies ceteris paribus to all writing" (69). Without the analysis of "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked," however, I think I would have been adrift when trying to define precisely what was problematic with that glib claim. My initial response was mainly to consider the many occasions on which the drastic differences between literary and non-literary texts have made themselves abundantly clear to me. The experience of reading and understanding Huck Finn is a very different experience from reading and understanding a transcript of the latest presidential speech. Perhaps the interpreter will draw on similar skills for these two texts, but the concerns are vastly different. If nothing else, the very purposes for reading Huck Finn or a presidential speech are most likely highly disparate. To bring it back to Ede and Lunsford, when I read the presidential speech, I straddle the line between an invoked and an addressed audience. Certainly, the politicians and the speechwriters don't know me or my particular concerns. They have, however, received letters from constituents like me, so they can attempt to address people like me. At the same time, they must invoke the audience they wish to address, as Ede and Lunsford's example shows President Carter doing. As an interested voter, my purpose for reading the speech in question determines what kind of audience I am. In contrast, my purpose for reading Huck Finn (I'm required to for a college class; I'm bored of facebook), could barely have even occurred to Twain. He could not address me. Thinking through this contrast brings home to me how appealing I find Ede and Lunsford's take on audience. How to put those complications into effect pedagogically? Well, now, that's a whole different issue, and one which these authors don't provide much guidance with.

Luckily, several other authors this week provided much more pedagogical guidance, giving me plenty of fodder for complaining that there's never enough time in the semester to cover everything, and also that I've been doing it all wrong. Johnson-Eilola and Selber's, and Bruffee's articles both hold great promise for practical applications. They address two of the major questions teachers ask: 1) What do I assign my students?; and 2) What do we do with all our classtime? Of course, the unspoken clause in both of those question is "in order to teach them the thing I want to teach them." To varying extents, these articles then skirt around the question of what that "thing" is and why it's valuable. I see the remaining two articles from this week's reading (Porter and Trimbur, respectively) as poking at that exact question, and--certainly in Trimbur's case--critiquing the answers provided by the original texts.

"Plagiarism, originality, assemblage" expose the hypocrisy inherent in (relatively) current composition theory: We tell students that texts are social constructs, but then ask the students to embody the Romantic notion of the individual genius when creating texts. The article purports to have found a way around the hypocrisy by providing students with "assemblage," or pastiche, assignments. Problem is, the authors never describe what such an assignment could look like in a composition class that only deals with the creation of all-text works. While the samples of web design are telling and can remove many doubts about the creativity entailed in "re-mixing" another's "original" work, they don't do much for the comp teacher constrained by programmatic requirements. So, fail on the practical pedagogy here. In conjunction with Porter's article, however, the practicality gets revived a bit, as Porter's discussion of intertextuality could be interpreted as a discussion of "remixing." As such, intertextuality and its working then become the things that we should be teaching our students through assemblage assignments. It's not just a matter of modeling the real world (which, of course, gets us back to the audience question), but also a matter of enabling students to discover for themselves the traces of intertextuality.

Bruffee's and Trimbur's articles similarly illuminate each other, although even more directly, since Trimbur writes in response to Bruffee. His critique that Bruffee's account of collaborative learning is too simplistic definitely rings true. Certainly, even in the realm of academics, no knowledge creation is ever fully disinterested or divorced from practical forces like funding and publication requirements for tenure (the latter of which Trimbur gestures to on p. 472). Complicating the notion with the idea of collaboration as not only an establishment of consensus but also as a defining of difference makes sense; I know that I am a qualified English grad student because I write like this and not like that. Again, also, the Trimbur article provides a more concrete pedagogic strategy, with his suggestion for beginning an intro lit class by discussing what defines literature and not-literature. In contrast, while Bruffee's piece gives me a sense of the dynamic he wants to foster, he gives no direction for how to accomplish that fostering. Trimbur for the win on both complexity and practicality.