"Invention and Identification Through Intertextual Appropriation of Academic Discourse"
About the AuthorGeorge 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 |
Methodology and ApplicationI propose the application of the Bakhtinian terms addressivity and appropriation as part of a composite intertextual framework that aims at achieving Burkean identification in the larger service of “persuasion” within the heteroglossic context of academic writing. Thus, identification and invention in academic contexts need to be (re)interpreted in the light of intertextuality, as conceived by the French poststructuralist critic Julia Kristeva, to capture thematic and structural interrelations of texts and how they may contribute to identification and persuasion in academic texts. Kristeva conceived of the text "as a mosaic of quotations" and noted "any text is an absorption and transformation of another" (66). This intertextual approach is appropriate for capturing the formation of identification within a discourse community by categorizing similar and/or congruent arguments and positioning them in relation to opposing views within a given text. Thus, positionality within the intertextual context becomes the key to identifying with certain disciplinary debates and concepts. Furthermore, the “linguistic signs” that name and capture the aforementioned disciplinary ideas and arguments, as Burke notes, become the indispensable means through which identification with one’s audience would be achieved. This model takes account of the dialogic nature of academic writing in which disciplinary alliances and positionality are of paramount significance. Thus, intertextuality as part of a conceptual framework would be utilized to reframe the use of linguistic signs, which Burke considers instrumental to establishing identification with one’s audience through the selection and arrangement of germane ideas that are amenable to authorial and textual purposes. This dialogic model would be employed to help students interact not only with one another in class discussions but also with the various articles and texts germane to the issue or topic at hand. As such, the dialogic practice of writing could be enacted in such a way that promotes students’ own process of meaning making and negotiation through class discussions, collaborative group reading/writing activities while situating it in the academic context of the various readings that students are assigned to read or research as part of their research projects. All the aforementioned terms-- that is, intertextuality, addressivity, and identification-- would come together to form a conceptual framework that aims at improving and enhancing student writing. This can be accomplished by positing a dialogic model for class instruction that underscores the interrelations between various readings and participants in the classroom. This dialogic model needs to be ultimately implemented into student writing and become part of the practice and evaluation. At the center of the controversy is the very nature of intertextuality. One of the most significant aspects of the term has been its repudiation of the traditional notion of an autonomous text, severed from all other texts, and conceived as the outcome of the solitary writer’s creativity and originality. In the intertextual sense, authors do not create their works; rather, they compile and combine them from pre-existing sources. Hence, intertextuality does not merely refer to direct quotations, paraphrases, and explicitly cited sources, but much more. One implication of this re-conceptualization of texts made out of various other texts is the difficulty and even uselessness of the search for sources if no source is, in fact, autonomous or original in the conventional sense and is itself constructed from various other texts. James Porter identifies two types of intertextuality: “iterability” and “presupposition.” The former term ascribes to the “repeatability” of “certain textual fragments to include not only explicit allusions, references, and quotations within discourse, but also unannounced sources and influences, clichés, phrases in the air, and traditions” (35). The latter term, on the other hand, captures “the assumptions a text makes about its referent, its readers, and its context – to portions of the text which are read, but which are not explicitly “there” (35). Porter finds Patricia Bizell’s term “the discourse community” useful in situating the text within a group of people with common, regulatory interests and expectations. As Porter explains, such groups share assumptions about appropriate objects for study and examination, the types of acceptable evidence, and the formal conventions to be followed. As such, the system sets limits and regulations, hence constraining discourse. Porter also notes that by underscoring “the intertextual nature of discourse … we shift our attention away from the writer as individual creator of the text and focus more on the sources and social context from which the writer’s discourse arises” (35). Thus, the social context may become more important than authorial intention. As Porter has pointed out, an intertextual approach which underscores the social and communal aspects of language can be productive since it re-conceptualizes the notion of author as the compiler who creates his/her text by bringing various sources together and applying them to a new context. Thus, creativity and originality become less a matter of producing new language or ideas and more of applying them to new contexts and circumstances. Bakhtin’s identification of utterance as the fundamental unit of language is germane since it is characterized by its addressivity toward those engaged in the discourse event and would consequently encompass textual production within an intertextual framework. The dialogic intertextual framework, as noted above, could be productively utilized to help students interact not only with one another in class discussions but also with the various articles and texts. It follows that each text would be conceived as an utterance that is addressed toward its intended audience and hence would manifest traces of other texts and authors as means of persuasion through identification or consubstantiality. As Porter indicates, “the proper focus of audience analysis is not the audience as receivers per se, but the intertext of the discourse community” (43). Consequently, the dialogic practice of writing could be enacted in such a way that promotes students’ own process of meaning-making through class discussions and collaborative group reading/writing activities, situated in the academic context and pertinent discourse communities. This can be accomplished by positing a dialogic model for class instruction that highlights the interrelations between different readings, writings, and participants in the classroom. Such an approach is also compatible with Tierney and Pearson’s pronouncement “that texts are written and read in a tug of war between authors and readers” (176). This dialogic, intertextual model needs to be ultimately implemented into student writing and become part of the practice and evaluation. The implementation of an intertextual framework in composition classes would be consequential since it addresses such fundamental issues as the formation of the authorial self as well as its interconnections with one’s audience based on the principle of addressivity within intertextual contexts. Thus, intertextuality adds to the traditional conception of the rhetorical situation occurring “as a result of the exigence, the audience, and a set of constraints”; instead it “creates its own contexts in addition to the immediate rhetorical situation” (D’Angello 43). Porter observes that “[a] poststructuralist rhetoric examines how audience (in the form of community expectations and standards) influences textual production and, in so doing, guides the development of the writer” (40). According to Porter, the social context becomes more important than authorial intention. Furthermore, an intertextual approach that underscores the social and communal aspects of language could be productive by re-conceptualizing the notion of author as the compiler who creates the text by bringing various sources together and appropriating and applying them to a new context. As Michael Halliday has cogently argued: [C]reativeness does not consist in producing new sentences. The newness of a sentence is quite unimportant--and unascertainable--property and "creativity" in language lies in the speaker’s ability to create new meanings: to realize the potentiality of language for the indefinite extension of its resources to new contexts of situation. (Explorations 42) In “Intertexulaity: How Texts Rely on Other Texts,” Bazerman calls this application of existing terms to new contexts “recontextualization” (90). Thus, originality becomes less a matter of producing new language and more a matter of applying the available language to new contexts and circumstances. In short, all the aforementioned terms -- that is, intertextuality, addressivity, and identification -- come together to form a composite conceptual framework that aims at improving and strengthening student writing. This can be accomplished by positing a dialogic model for class instruction that underlines the interrelations between different readings and participants in the classroom. This model needs to be ultimately implemented into student writing and become part of the practice and evaluation. |