"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

Literature Review

In A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke challenges the rationalistic, Aristotelian notion of persuasion through logical, emotional, and ethical appeals by asserting that identification with one’s audience is the primary means through which persuasion is achieved. Burke’s explication of identification is fairly straightforward: “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (55).

The Aristotelian conception of persuasion works primarily through the use of arguments in a rationalistic manner, which is based on the assumption that persuasion primarily functions at the conscious level. Burke, however, contends that Aristotelian rhetoric is not blind to identification; in fact, it acknowledges the key role it plays in persuasion. For instance, Burke refers to Aristotle’s listing of the various types of opinion an orator should employ in order to “recommend a policy or to turn people against it” (56). In other words, the speaker should consider what type of “opinions” would stir men to different types of emotions such as “rage, fear, compassion, shame, indignation, envy, rivalry, charity” and tap into it to elicit the needed response or action in the audience (56). Thus, identification could be achieved by invoking the opinion that the speaker knows the audience will find appealing, which in turn would make it more likely that they would be swayed by the orator’s or writer’s arguments.

Another way through which identification is attained is through the use of formal rhetorical devices such as asyndeton, polysyndeton, antithesis, climax, and anaphora. By utilizing these formal devices, the audience is induced to participate in the rhetorical act by building their expectations and inducing them to identify with the speaker or writer through the rhetorical process which is built on meeting the listeners’ or readers’ expectations. Thus, as Burke correctly notes, identification with the audience is achieved “by inducing the auditor to participate in the form, as a ‘universal’ locus of appeal, and next by trying to include a partisan statement within this same pale of assent” (59).

Burke considers the use of linguistic “signs” indispensable to achieving “consubstantiality” or common ground between author and audience. Thus, the linguistic cues trigger an unconscious response in the audience that would compel them to identify with the writer through the medium of the text. This assertion is based on Burke’s contention that Aristotelian rhetoric is essentially rationalistic and operates primarily at the conscious level with the corollary negligence of unconscious mental processes that would also need to be addressed in persuasion. Hence, Burke proposes the notion of “identification” as the key rhetorical concept that would be accomplished through the use of linguistic signs. In “On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical Symmetry,” Burke presents his case for identification as the major rhetorical term that would result in persuasion as follows:

Hence we take the position that a “rhetoric of the unconscious,” in keeping with psychoanalytic criticism and the Marxist study of “ideology,” offers the only fruitful extension beyond the Aristotelian stress. This, we believe, under the aegis of “identification” as key term. (336)

As noted above, Burke’s conception of identification does not solely focus on the unconscious and semiconscious processes of the human mind through an individualistic, psychological lens; rather, his notion of identification is social and dialogic as well since he places the individual consciousness in dialectical relation to other individuals as participants in the social processes. Thus, it encompasses both conscious and unconscious factors in appealing to one’ audience. Again, Burke cogently elucidates the issue in “Rhetoric – Old and New” in the following terms:

If I had to sum up in one word the difference between the "old" and the "new" …  I would reduce it to this: the key term for the "new" rhetoric would be "identification," which can include a partially unconscious factor in appeal. (203)

Nevertheless, this identification might be approached from a number of different perspectives. In Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford argue against the notion of authorial voice, which is pertinent to the issue of identification, by contending that the heteroglossic nature of language results in “a polyphonic self, one that can never constitute the single ‘voice’ traditionally ascribed to the author” (92). George Dillon, however, considers the interaction and collision between the different voices/texts instrumental to the formation of a “personal” voice (71). In fact, although the sources may be varied, their selection and arrangement should be attributed to the unifying principle, which would make it more amenable to identification by the audience due to providing a more nuanced and multifaceted discussion of the issues under consideration. In this paper, I have adopted Dillon’s view and incorporated it within an intertextual framework in which the writer’s position vis-à-vis the topic under consideration as well as other pertinent texts becomes the unifying, organizing principle. As Bazerman observes, “Through such [intertextual] relations a text evokes a representation of the discourse situation, the textual resources that bear on the situation, and how the current text positions itself and draws on other texts” (86).

The above debate is consequential since it addresses such fundamental writing issues as the formation of authorial self, identification with one’s audience, and positioning one’s text in relation to other disciplinary texts and arguments. Furthermore, it aligns with Bakhtinian concepts and how they are to be used productively in approaching the Burkean notion of identification as a means of achieving persuasion. In Speech Genres and Other Late essays, Bakhtin identifies utterance as the fundamental unit of language that is characterized by its addressivity toward those engaged in the discourse. Furthermore, as mentioned at the heart of the text, as of the Bakhtinian utterance, is addressivity in the sense that each text has its envisioned or intended audience and is written at least in part to respond to their ideas, views, and potential objections and queries.

As previously noted, in The Dialogic Imagination Bakhtin underlines and explicates the addressivity of language. In texts, dialogic, intertextual interrelations could be explicit in the form of quotations and paraphrases or implicit in the form of allusions, images, symbols, motifs, as well as shared thematic and conceptual relations/presuppositions. Germane to the issue of intertextuality is appropriation, which Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright define as “the act of borrowing, stealing, or taking over others’ meanings to one’s own ends” (350). The utilization of others’ meanings for one’s own purposes is the key feature of appropriation and one which is pivotal to the constructivist, intertextual approach to writing instruction espoused in this paper and is particularly suitable to academic writing.