"Invention and Identification Through Intertextual Appropriation of Academic Discourse"

About the Author

George Shamshayooadeh teaches English composition and literature at The National Hispanic University in San Jose, California. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in English at Old Dominion University with twin emphases is rhetoric-composition and literary studies. He holds two master’s degrees in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and English Literature. George has also taught at a number of community colleges in Northern California as well as San Jose State University. Prior to his work in Silicon Valley, he taught English composition and literature courses at a number of universities and institutions in Tehran, Iran, including the Islamic Open (Azad) University, College of Foreign Languages. His research interests are diverse and vary from composition theory and pedagogy to narratology and postcolonial fiction.

Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Methodology and Application

Pedagogical Implications

Case Study

Course Arrangement

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction 

In the light of prevalent and ubiquitous intertextual relations in academic texts, there is an acute, palpable need to develop writing instruction that addresses students’ often insufficient requisite background knowledge (e.g. schemata) as well as understanding of intertextual relations at both the receptive and productive ends of the composing process (Porter; Bazerman). Indeed, the need for students to read about the disciplinary debates in order to become familiar with arguments and issues within the proverbial Burkean parlor is clearly needed. The presence of underprepared students who are not ready to tackle the demands of expository and argumentative writing at the post-secondary level, which has been reported by Ann M. Johns and others, provides us with the exigence to revamp the teaching of writing in such a way that takes account of the interconnectivity of texts at conceptual and linguistic levels.

Johns --who for years directed the American Language Institute, the Writing Across the Curriculum Program, and the Center for Teaching and Learning at San Diego State University-- reports that “discipline specific faculty who teach novices at the undergraduate level … sometimes complain that their students ‘do not like to write like academics’ or ‘cannot comprehend’ academic prose, arguing that these are general abilities that we should be teaching" (505). As Judy Parr aptly notes, students’ writing is often perceived as weak compared to their knowledge and performance in other subjects such as reading and Mathematics. Additionally, William J. Torgerson’s following statement is typical of many instructors’ experiences in developmental and first-year composition classes: “In the first stack of papers I collected, I read a lot of thinly researched projects about abortion, capital punishment, and violence in the media” (87). It also confirms my experiences of grading stacks of freshman composition papers over the last ten years in Northern California. Thus, a new approach to writing instruction with new pedagogical implications is called for. In this paper, I will propose an intertextual approach to composition instruction, grounded in theories of intertextuality as well as the Bakhtinian notions of addressivity heteroglossia, and dialogism, in order to provide a rich rhetorical and conceptual framework that would facilitate student writing, particularly in terms of appropriation and application of texts and the means to achieving persuasion through Burkean identification via positionality.

Despite the influence that Bakhtinian theories and terms have exerted in literary and cultural studies as well as in genre studies, their influence in composition studies has been relatively modest. For instance, they have been used to shed light on “the individual writer’s philosophical or political filter” (Middendorff 205). Thus, for the most part Bakhtinian notions have not been systematically implemented in composition classrooms. Given the fact that heteroglossia exists fundamentally as a characteristic of language and not merely of the novel, it can potentially be used not only critically to shed light on argumentative and expository writing as practiced in college composition classes, but also productively to generate a more detailed intertextual practice in student writing. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin elaborates on the multiplicity of languages, dialects, idiolects, and other variations of language that constitute the social stratifications of language. His elucidation of the varieties of language as well as their social correlates is informative:

In any given historical moment of verbal-ideological life, each generation at each social level has its own language; moreover, its own vocabulary, its own particular accentual system that, in their turn, vary depending on social level, academic institution (the language of the cadet, the high school student, the trade school student are all different languages) and other stratifying factors. (290)

Bakhtin’s above-cited description of the heteroglossia that exists in the society ties the varieties of language to the various locations and periods along with their prevalent values, vocabularies, and other distinctive characteristics that set them apart from others. Another noteworthy aspect of social heteroglossia is the dynamic “co-existence of social-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between the different epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form” (291). Furthermore, Bakhtin perceptively observes that the aforementioned languages “of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages’” (291). A similar conceptualization of academic texts comprising the coexistence and juxtaposition of the authorial text and its relations to other texts is plausible since it lends itself well to an intertextual conceptualization of academic writing. Furthermore, within the context of academic writing, the Bakhtinian centripetal (unifing) and centrifugal (dispersing) forces are quite apparent since they theoretically encompass the points of convergence and disagreement within the disciplines (discourse communities); hence capturing its dynamic and ever-evolving nature.

At the heart of the text, as of the Bakhtinian utterance is addressivity in the sense that each text has its envisioned audience and is written at least in part to respond to their ideas, views, and anticipated or real objections and queries. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin notes: “The word in a living conversation is directly, blatantly oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction” (280). These dialogic relations are approachable from both productive and receptive angles. From the productive end, the author is viewed as the one who draws on his/her conscious and subconscious knowledge of various texts to put together a text at a given time; thus generating a “mosaic” of already existing texts in a new configuration rather than creating it anew. From the receptive end, the readers’ interpretation of a text relates to their schemata including familiarity with the specific genre and its characteristics as well as their prior knowledge of germane themes, motifs, arguments, and contextual factors that may shed light on the text under consideration. Of paramount importance is the nexus between audience and author from a dialogic perspective that approaches the production of texts as an intrinsically dialogic process.

Charles Bazerman defines intertextuality as “The explicit and implicit relations that a text or utterance has to prior, contemporary and potential future texts” (86). Although intertextual relations are generally acknowledged, as Scollon, Young, Tsang, and Jones have pointed out, these interrelations are often simplistically reduced to quoting and paraphrasing in composition classes without situating them as part of an overarching conceptual and pedagogical framework that takes account of the explicit and implicit interconnections between texts and is guided by a textual purpose within an intertextual framework. For instance, one of the issues that writing instructors often complain about is the shallowness and superficiality of students’ arguments and the thinness of their evidence, which stem from their insufficient intertextual knowledge of the discourse community at its receptive end, which is also tied to the issue of invention and appropriation of texts and ideas for their authorial purposes at the productive end. As Ann M. Johns reports, faculty often complain that their students “do not write like academics” or “cannot comprehend” academic writing (505).

Students’ violations and misappropriations of writing conventions range from organization and arrangement of the material to language, style, and diction issues. I would contend that adopting a dialogic, intertextual approach to writing instruction that incorporates multiple texts on a given topic and explicitly expounds and highlights their various intertextual relations would be instrumental to student-writers’ formation of authorial and textual identities. Furthermore, such an approach would entail the re-conceptualization of invention, persuasion, and audience within the framework of intertextuality. Hence, a review of the theories and premises underlying Burkean identification and intertextuality is in order to explicate their underlying conceptual premises and pedagogical implications.