"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 |
Pedagogical ImplicationsAs Porter and others have suggested, in the context of academic writing it might be reasonable to think of writing in the intertextual context of discourse communities. The term “discourse communities” was originally conceived by the sociolinguist Martin Nystrand and further developed by John Swales; however, the idea behind it has been around for quite some time. Foucault’s term “the discursive formation,” Stanley Fish’s term “the interpretive community,” and the linguistic term “speech community” are considered its predecessors. Nonetheless, it is the term discourse community that has gained widespread acceptance and seems to be more appropriate in rhetoric and composition studies in which both the receptive/interpretive and productive/generative aspects of discourse are underscored. Porter describes a discourse community as “a group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated” (38-39). Thus, by becoming immersed in a discourse community and operating within its boundaries, the members become well-versed in its shared assumptions, arguments, ideas, recent developments, appropriate language and style, as well as other features that may simultaneously facilitate and constrain communication and debate. In the above context, Porter discusses the pedagogy that such a conception of intertextuality entails by countering and replacing the traditional notion of the text produced by an individual, secluded writer with the idea of joining a discourse community by learning its topics, conventions, and strategies for writing and becoming “socialized members” of the discourse community. Consequently, he underlines the need to utilize appropriate “heuristics,” “critical reading,” “formal conventions,” “community discourse values,” and “audience analysis” (42). He continues by reiterating that the prevalent, romantic image of the solitary writer needs to be replaced by the new paradigm of joining a discourse community in which students learn how texts are constructed by utilizing conventional themes, motifs, style and other such features. In this respect, I would suggest that the essay as a genre, which is attributed to the solitary writer addressing an audience, is traced to the eighteenth century in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, which made mass production of texts economically feasible by making them affordable to the masses. However, with the proliferation of print and digital texts, which often draw on a multiplicity of texts and sources, the research paper and the multi-sourced term paper seem to be more authentic class assignments than the traditional essay with its usual focus on one particular text. In freshman composition classes, students often pursue different majors and come with all kinds of backgrounds, interests, and pursuits. Consequently, the close cohesiveness of a professional discourse community, such as the Rhetoric Society of America with shared disciplinary and epistemic commonalities, would not be feasible at the undergraduate level. I contend that a looser intertextual approach, which is oriented toward a constructivist dialogic perspective, would be more conducive to student writing in freshman composition classes. In this Bakhtinian orientation of intertextuality, the traditional notion of “audience” is replaced with the notion of “addressivity” that Bakhtin recognizes as a fundamental characteristic of “utterance” in particular and of language in general. It would be more productive to replace the concept of audience, which implies a unitary or collective entity, with the Bakhtinian term addressivity within an intertextual framework that underscores the event in which communication takes place as well as the reciprocity among texts. Chris Anson contends that writing instruction is often “founded on the assumption that students learn well by reading and writing with each other, responding to each others’ drafts, negotiating revisions, discussing ideas, sharing perspectives, and finding some level of trust as collaborators in their mutual development” (270). I would argue that writing instruction should be student-centered with the instructor acting more as a facilitator than a subject-matter expert. Hence, the instructor sets up the task-based, collaborative/dialogic activities and students relish the autonomy of writing agents in both in-class and online forums such as discussion board threads, postings, and blogs. The nature of these interactions will be primarily textual; however, by structuring the class into groups based on their research topics, the students would be encouraged to interact with one another in class as well as via synchronous online technologies such as Skype and Google Hangouts. One way this could be achieved is to divide the class into research groups of three or four, either optional or required, and have student-members agree on a general debatable/research topic that they would then approach from different angles due to its kaleidoscopic complexity. For instance, a controversial topic such as embryonic stem cell research could be approached from bioethical, medical, and financial angles while simultaneously providing students with a shared platform for interaction. In her 1989 keynote address at the CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication), Andrea Lunsford enumerated five characteristics of rhetoric and composition, one of which was that “We are dialogic, multivoiced, heteroglossic. Our classroom practices enact what others only talk about; they are sites for dialogues and polyphonic choruses” (76). Thus, as Lunsford astutely observes, the composition classroom should be designed in such a way that prompts students to become intrinsically motivated and to gain confidence by engaging in the dialogic, intertextual debates on the given topics within what Ann M. Johns calls communities of practice. This dialogism could be enacted and fostered in the composition classroom by adopting a thematic approach in which the reading selections such as essays and articles present different and opposing viewpoints on identical or similar topics; thus by exposing student-writers to antithetical perspectives, student-writers are compelled to take positions vis-à-vis the topic(s) under consideration. The above approach is compatible with what Nancy Kline calls “writing as exploration” in which she urges her students to “write to find out what [they are] thinking” (16). She asks her students to read the type of essays that somehow encompass other texts or respond to them so that they would learn to incorporate those texts into their own writing by following the reviewed model essays and texts. In this pedagogical context, other texts are used to tease out students’ own voices. Kline uses intertextuality as a kind of support mechanism and possibly as a heuristic in what is often called expressivist pedagogy. Hence, it would make pedagogical sense to select texts that manifest a good deal of intertextuality by sharing common sources, texts, ideas, and queries and/or by positioning themselves against one another. In this respect, Bazerman underlines the need for “intertextual analysis” which “examines the relation of a statement to that sea of words, how it uses those words, how it positions itself in respect to those other words” (84). I concur with Bazerman that the use of intertextual analysis in the composition classroom would enhance students’ meta-linguistic awareness by highlighting the intertextual connections, both explicit in the form of quotations and paraphrases, and implicit in the form of ideas, images, presuppositions, and so forth. Moreover, perceiving these intertextual relations is instrumental to the deeper understanding of ideas, concepts, presuppositions, and arguments and how they are re-conceptualized and appropriated in each text. |