Writing/Disciplinarity

A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy

Paul Prior

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136683558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Over the past century, the explosive growth of scientific, technical, and cultural disciplines has profoundly affected our daily lives. However, processes of enculturation in sites such as graduate education that have helped to form these disciplines have received very limited research attention. In those sites, graduate students write diverse documents, including course papers, departmental examinations, theses and dissertations, grant and fellowship applications, and disciplinary publications. Thus, writing is one of the central domains of enculturation--an activity through which graduate students and professors display and negotiate disciplinary knowledge, genres, identities, and institutional contexts. This volume explores this intersection of writing and disciplinary enculturation through a series of ethnographic case studies. These case studies provide the most thorough descriptions available today of the lived experience of graduate seminars, combining analysis of classroom talk, students' texts and professor's written responses, institutional contexts, students' representations of their writing and its contexts, and professors' representations of their tasks and their students. Given the complexities that the ethnographic data displayed, the author found that conventional notions of writing as a process of transcription and of disciplines as unified discourse communities were inadequate. As such, this book also offers an in-depth exploration of sociohistoric theory in relation to writing and disciplinary enculturation. Specific case studies introduce, apply, and further elaborate notions of:
* writing as literate activity,
* authorship as mediated by other people and artifacts,
* classroom tasks as speech genres,
* enculturation as the interplay of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses, and
* disciplinarity as a deeply heterogeneous, laminated, and dialogic process. This blend of research and theory should be of interest to scholars and students in such fields as writing studies, rhetoric, writing across the curriculum, applied linguistics, English for academic purposes, science and technology studies, higher education, and the ethnography of communication.

PART III

Literate Activity and Mediated
Authorship

5

Literate Activity, Scenes of
Writing, and Mediated Authorship

Discussing notions of audience in socially oriented analyses of writing, Phelps (1990) observes that writing researchers and theorists have continued to be caught up in “the textual and the psychologized rhetorics where abstractions like the fictive audience (textual representation) and the cognitive audience (mental representation) are more salient than the actual exchanges of talk and text by which people more or less publicly draft and negotiate textual meanings” (p. 158). As writing research moved out of the laboratory to explore such exchanges of talk and text in naturalistic settings, it ran up against its own assumptive frameworks at a key interface between theory and methodology: the formation and representation of the object of study itself. As Brandt (1990; see also chap. 1) argued, researchers have often fixated on material texts rather than human activity in defining the nature of literacy. Witte (1985) noted a similar fixation in writing process research. His notion of pre-textual revision, in effect, questioned the whole edifice of objects of study that process researchers (e.g., Flower & Hayes, 1981) had erected around focal acts of transcription and the focal artifacts of texts. Witte (1992) extended his critique to studies of situated writing, arguing that historical streams of semiosis could not be arbitrarily fenced in by an a priori privileging of linguistic-textual artifacts and transcriptional processes.

The analyses offered in the last three chapters point to the complexity, heterogeneity, and particularity of academic writing tasks. The streams of salient activity that converge in these accounts of textual production and reception blend talking and listening, reading and writing, thinking and feeling, observing and acting. It is also clear that the historical trajectories of the artifacts, practices, and persons that interact in these scenes of writing implicate activity that is not only multimodal, but also temporally and spatially dispersed and distributed across multiple persons, artifacts, and sites. The unit of analysis then should not be that synecdochically foregrounded pair, transcription and text. Bateson (1972) argued vividly against accepting such commonsense units of analysis, contrasting as an example the everyday view of the self with a more dynamic, functional perspective:

But what about“me”? Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways that leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of a blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round. But when the blind man sits down to eat his lunch, his stick and its messages will no longer be relevant—if it is his eating you want to understand, (p. 459)

In this view, talk in the classroom, for example, may not be simply a context of and for writing; it may be writing. More precisely, this view suggests that transcriptions are events and texts are artifacts inextricably fused in functional systems of literate activity.

I am suggesting that an adequate account of writing must begin with three fundamental axioms. First, writing is situated. In other words, we must treat writing (and reading) as fully historical, recognizing that, as Brandt (1990) argues, writers and readers are inescapably situated in particular places and in the moment-to-moment flow of lived time. Second, writing is mediated. It is not solo activity, but a confluence of phylogenetic, cultural-historical, mesogenetic, ontogenetic, and microgenetic trajectories that weave together people, practices, artifacts, and institutions. Finally, as an important corollary of mediation, writing is dispersed. Focal texts and transcriptional events are no more autonomous than the spray thrown up by white water in a river, and like that spray, literate acts today are far downstream from their sociohistoric origins. This notion of writing as situated, mediated, and dispersed is the basis for what I am calling literate activity. Literate activity, in this sense, is not located in acts of reading and writing, but as cultural forms of life saturated with textuality, that is strongly motivated and mediated by texts.

Given this perspective, it becomes particularly important to examine the concrete nature of cultural spheres of literate activity. As was discussed in Chapter1, writing researchers have generally conceptualized disciplinarity in basically structuralist terms, seeing discourse communities as abstract, autonomous, spatialized structures of objects and rules, and disciplinary enculturation as transmission of those structures to largely passive novices. The analyses of the temporal and perspectival multiplicity of writing tasks in Mead’s seminar, of the diverse texts and activities of Kohl’s seminars, and of the distinct trajectories of participation that Mai and Teresa displayed in attaining an MA, all point to heterogeneity and particularity more than uniformity and generality. These analyses also illustrated ways that students and professors generated the texts, tasks, and contexts of seminars by drawing on diverse resources to align their literate activity.

A basic theme across many critiques of structuralism is the need to move from objects to events, from abstract systems to situated doing. When we shift from asking what language is to what it does, its constitutive functions, its contextand perspective-forming functions, come to the fore. These functions stake out the intersubjective grounds for aligning meaning making and action. Bruner (1986; see also Bruner & Lucariello, 1989) has identified one set of these linguistic resources in discussing subjunctivizing, a notion quite consistent with the Bakhtinian emphasis on the evaluative dimension of utterances (Bakhtin, 1986; Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1978; Voloshinov, 1973). Moreover, these constitutive functions (e.g., prolepsis, presupposition, implicature, subjectification) also appear to play key roles in socialization (Bruner, 1986; Bruner & Lucariello, 1989; Rommetveit, 1992; Stone, 1993). In analyzing Kohl’s seminars, I suggested that topics, as semiotic artifacts intertextually indexing discourses, represent a key set of constitutive resources for disciplinarity. They fore-cast the shape of an activity, invoking its goals, and subtly working to coordinate and sustain joint, if partial, attention. Orienting to the shape of an activity in these ways may be a critical step toward eventually inhabiting those practices. The continuities that graduate students displayed in their work also suggested the need to look at ways that longer term, more durative forms of alignment and perspective setting shape trajectories of participation in disciplinary practices.

We cannot look only for interrelationships among communication, learning, socialization, and social formation: Rather, we must grapple with the fact that communication is learning is socialization is social formation, that literate activity is not only a process whereby texts are produced, exchanged, and used, but also part of a continuous sociohistoric process in which persons, artifacts, practices, institutions, and communities are being formed and reformed. This recognition, however, brings us to the threshold of a new problem. When writing is seen as activity that is sociohistorically situated, mediated, and dispersed, we run into an assumption more engrained than writing as transcription and text, the assumption of agency, of the writer as author.

As Phelps (1990) notes, poststructuralist, and particularly sociohistoric, theories have challenged dominant accounts of authorship and audience:

[The concept of authorship] has been put into question by the dissolution of text in intertext, self in intersubjectivity and by the disappearance of every boundary that formerly separated (however permeably) mind from mind, mind from text, mind from material world, text from other text, text from talk, present experience from memory, object from context, and so on. In this world, audience is no longer the problem, but the given; it is ubiquitous. It is authorship we can no longer take for granted, once we understand ourselves to be so comprehensively invaded and possessed by the other, in the form of internalized language, genre, ideology (or alternatively, so diffused into the ambient flux of words), (p. 162)

Studying writing tasks situated in graduate seminars, I quickly confronted gaps between the tacit assumptions about authorship I had brought to my research and the complex histories of textual production and reception I was tracing.¹ Questions of authorship entail fundamental issues of agency. I approached these issues hesitantly, yet found I had to address them to understand literate activity and disciplinarity in these settings. In this chapter and the three that follow, I take up issues of authorship with a mix of theoretical and empirical sketches, working toward a sociohistoric framework that links writing, authorship, and disciplinary enculturation in literate activity.

SCENES OF WRITING

Writing Studies has actually constructed its objects of study, not simply from abstract transcription and text, but from a set of prototypical scenes that represent writing and authorship. Linda Brodkey (1987) has described and analyzed one key image, the solitary writer in the garret, a scene she called “the reigning trope for writing” in modem culture (p. 55). Brodkey describes a scene that invokes a repertoire not only of settings (the garret, study, library carrel, prison cell) and characters (in this case, the solitary literary writer), but also of typical plots and subjectivities. Brodkey’s analysis of this synecdochic scene points to its grounding in modem-romantic notions of the writer as alienated artist, of writing as inspired transcription, and of texts as autonomous physical-semiotic objects released from the scene of writing to make their own way in the world. Ironically, this scene has also been inscribed in writing process research, which methodologically asks people to write alone in bounded times and spaces and theoretically represents writing as individual cognition interacting with a material text.

The scene Brodkey has described remains a powerful, fundamental trope for writing both in specialized disciplinary and general cultural discourses; however, it must be set beside other scenes that organize our understanding of writing and authorship. As Phelps (1990) points out, Brodkey’s solitary scribbler blends into another powerful scene, the abstract representation of writing as conversation. This image is dominated by the basic social unit of the dyad and motivated by the activity of exchanging messages. The writer makes a text for a reader in order to share her experiences or knowledge, to entertain the reader, or to persuade the reader. The reader receives the text, works diligently to decode its messages, and may sometimes even respond to the writer. This literate conversation is structured around the focal site of the text, either a mobile text that links a solitary writer to a solitary reader or a fixed text, spread flat on table or desk, the point where the reader’s and writer’s gazes intersect and they are intersubjectively fused. With texts represented as a kind of filtering medium for the conduit of messages, the natural plots of this scene revolve around clarity, implicitly governed by the initiating conditions of the writer as she inscribes ideas, more or less clearly, in the text. In this scene, the writer and reader enact a paradigmatic Gricean (1989) plot of cooperation, constructing a reciprocally shared conceptual world through the negotiated exchange of messages.

While Brodkey (1987) and Phelps (1990) have identified general sociocultural representations of writing, other scenes are grounded in particular social institutions. Especially relevant to this research are images tied to school, the workplace, and disciplines. Although the image of writing in school contains fragments of both the solitary writer (writing alone) and the writer-reader dyad (writing to the teacher), its dominant setting is the crowded classroom rather than the cell and its basic plot ruptures the symmetry and interchangeability of the writer-reader dyad. Acting as the prime mover in this institutional universe, the teacher motivates the writer, structures the writing (process and product) through assignment and monitoring, and then delivers a final judgment, evaluating student-writers and their textual products. Again, texts are powerfully foregrounded objects in this scene. However, the texts are no longer represented simply as the communicative conduits of the conversational scene: Student texts are seen as crystallizations of students’ intelligence, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and effort, magic mirrors teachers gaze into to discover who is the most literate on the roster. The dominance of the teacher is reflected in the narrative time of school writing, a discontinuous representation organized from the teacher’s perspective around a textualized version of the Initiation-ReplyEvaluation (IRE) structure of classroom discourse (Mehan, 1979): The teacher initiates writing (the assignment), the student replies (turning in a text), and the teacher evaluates (returning the student’s text, usually with comments and grades).

The information workplace is another institutional site around which images of authorship have been forming, and graduate school, with its teaching and research assistantships, is also an information work site. The workplace writer is physically located in offices or laboratories and socially in bureaucratic structures. The workplace is a scene where documents cycle through a hierarchy of interlocking rings (internal and external) and claims of individual authorship are attenuated or suppressed.² The image of the workplace has also been generated out of cultural commonplaces of economics and business. With a Reaganite faith in the rationality of the market, workplace writing has been constructed within a discourse of authenticity; it is real writing, driven by bottom lines, and subjected to the “real world” evaluations of consumers, clients, or colleagues rather than the arbitrary criteria of school grades and test scores. In this institutional scene, texts carry sociorhetorical force. They function as potent tools of persuasion or as textual performatives, prized for what they do, their origins largely irrelevant except when origin itself enhances or threatens effect.

The final scene I discuss here, writing in the disciplines, is particularly relevant to writing in graduate school, a site permeated with the disciplinary writing of professors and students. As with workplace writing, images of disciplinary writing have been formed from a discourse of the real. Here, texts carry sociorhetorical forces designed to effect changes in the world, specifically in disciplinary knowledge and the application of that knowledge. However, disciplinary authors resemble the lone artists of Brodkey’s garret rather than the in-corporated subjects of the workplace, an irony given that many of these authors produce texts in workplace laboratories and routinely publish with lists of co-authors in the tens or even hundreds (see Lunsford & Ede, 1990). Where the lone writer in the cell has been written as inspired...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor’s Introduction Charles Bazerman
• Preface
• I: Introduction
• II: Situated Explorations of Academic Writing Tasks
• III: Literate Activity and Mediated Authorship
• IV: Redrawing The Maps of Writing and Disciplinarity
• Appendix A — Situating the Research: Multiple Exposures of a Methodology
• Appendix B — Conventions of Data Representation
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index