On Readings for 3/4/10

“The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” When I first read the title of Walter J. Ong’s article, I thought—naively, of course—that Ong’s argument was going to be that a writer’s audience, for all intents and purposes, does not exist and that’s why it’s a fiction. Very quickly, however, I realized what Ong meant with his pithy/catchy title is that a writer’s audience is always a construct, an imaginative creation on the part of a writer as well as on the part of an audience member in direct relation to the written work of said writer (as much as a writer tries to imagine and to write to a particular audience, members within that audience try to read the products of those efforts as they think the writer intended them to). Drawing on my own experience in the ENG 101 composition classroom at UNLV, the basic instruction we give our students is that their audience extends beyond the professor to include college-educated people with an interest in the topic of their essays. I have serious doubts that—no matter what we tell them or write out on our assignment sheets—students ever believe that anyone other than their professor (and maybe one or two of their peers) is going to read and/or have an interest in the essays they have to produce in composition. And in ENG 102, imagining/creating an audience only goes a step or two further because we do try to teach students that they need to account for the fact that they may be dealing with audiences who—though college-educated and interested in the subjects of their essays—may also be disinclined to agree or even downright hostile toward the point of view or argument students are trying to make in their own works. In both the 101/102 situations, the audience always remains a construct of the student writer’s imagination and, hence, as much of a fiction as Ong suggests.

In “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford continue the conversation about audience and how the idea of audience impacts the pragmatics of teaching and learning composition. If I understood Ede and Lunsford correctly, an Audience Addressed is a known commodity, i.e. knowledge of an “audiences attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible (via observation and analysis) but essential” when it comes to writing in the composition classroom (156). The problem, for Ede and Lunsford, with this model of audience and writer interaction, is that it relies too heavily on audience response (rather than writer agency) for judgment of the success or failure of a writer’s work. The phrase Audience Invoked, on the other hand, is more in line with Ong’s idea of a writer’s audience always being a fiction: writers, from the perspective of an invoked audience, are always trying to figure out who makes up the audience of their writing productions and what are their wants, needs, desires, expectations, etc. as readers. Ede and Lunsford go on to propose an audience that is shaped by the demands of the rhetorical situation at hand—as such, an audience can be addressed or invoked. What is most important is the writer who ought to be “guided by a sense of purpose and by the particularities of a specific rhetorical situation” and who “establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play” in reading her/his work (166).

For me, audience has always been a rather shadowy concept that—despite having taught in the composition classroom for a few years now—I feel like I have no idea how to teach to my students in a way that will allow them to come to a comprehensive understanding of the concept that they can use/rely on as they continue their educational and professional endeavors. As a graduate student specializing in Shakespeare studies, my idea of audience when I write—in most instances, at any rate—is more influenced by the ideas of intertextuality and discourse communities that James E. Porter discusses in “Interextuality and Discourse Community.” When I’m writing about a Shakespearean play, I have to be aware of the fact that 400 years (give or take) of criticism and ideas precede me and my work—and I have to acknowledge that mass of knowledge and insight in the way I write/what I say both explicitly and implicitly, or else my work is never going to be taken seriously by the community of Shakespeareans with which I am involved with professionally. So, for example, if I’m writing a character study of Iago from Othello, I need to be aware that character study within the larger enterprise of Shakespeare studies got its start with A.C. Bradley in the early 20th century AND that character study has, in the main, fallen out of favor in the contemporary critical world where Shakespeare is concerned. But how do you teach such ideas—in general or in specific circumstances—to undergraduates who are not yet full members (if you will) of such discourse communities—especially, for example, here at UNLV where our ENG 101 course focuses on teaching student how to write generic essays like the narrative, the definition, the explanation, the problem-solution, and the researched argument essay? Except for the latter, how can we make discourse and their situatedness within discourse make sense to our students at the undergraduate level?

Bruffee, in “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” expands on the idea of larger, organizing fields of discourse our undergraduate students are becoming involved with as members of the university community. Seeing these discourses as more encompassing conversations that mankind has been having for eons, Bruffee argues that students working in collaborative environments and situations—as opposed to individually—enhances learning because it mimics not only how things work in the “real” world, but also how “real” academics work with one another in academe. I have a very negative bias against just about anything associated with collaborative learning, and I can’t imagine why students wouldn’t, too—given that grades are always individual results, not collective results. Also, drawing on my experiences, again, in the UNLV ENG 101/102 classroom, I’ve found that students engagement with collaborative learning as regards peer reviewing his lackluster if not almost hostile. Most students give little more than a half-hearted effort to truly responding to the papers of their peers which, as the instructor, makes it seem like such a collaborative learning exercise is not at all beneficial.

Trimbur, in “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning,” voices some of my other concerns as regards collaborative learning. Of course, Trimbur admits he’s not the first to say it, but he does summarize what others have said very well: that collaborative learning can—if not done right—can create circumstances in which group think becomes a hegemonic force that silences the voices of students who disagree with prevailing views. As such, Trimbur goes on to argue for a collaborative learning pedagogy that courts dissensions or dissensus. Once again, as a student and as a professor, collaborative learning in whatever form makes me nervous and I would want to shy away from it.

Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s article, “Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage,” was an interesting read, to say the least. I liked how they tried to link things from architecture and web design to composition pedagogies which, in their opinion, are way too Romantic in that they insist on the perpetuation of the student-as-lone-genius-producing-original-work myth. If, for example, you look at any of the housing tracts I’ve seen sprout up just in my lifetime here in the Las Vegas metropolitan area as well as all over Southern California, the design of the houses is depressingly the same in terms of styles and stucco colors, etc. And, since last December, I’ve gotten hooked on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live, which, at this time, is featuring a gay love story that is being very well-told. Of course, I don’t have time to watch full episodes of One Life to Live every single day, so I’ve turned to watching YouTube clips instead. A number of the posters to YouTube have taken to posting only those scenes from each episode that involve Kyle and Oliver from the gay love story. In fact, one poster has created new title sequences for these compilation clips and called them One Life to Live: The Kyle and Oliver Story. All of this is assemblage in exactly the way Johnson-Eilola and Selber talk about it. Why can't students do something similar in their compositions?