Reference:
Review Excerpts 'We have ... an unprecedented opportunity to imagine what the field of
composition might look like should everyone turn out to be partly right -- should
our warring tribes at last have learned enough about language to speak together
in the same conversation' (10).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | composition |
conversation |
language |
'A rhetoric divested of every specific connection to human purposes and
experience would be more than elusive, ... it would be unteachable, or nearly so,
and irrelevant as well, since it would help not at all in resolving the issues no one
can afford to neglect -- whether the Congress should reduce the national debt by
cutting social services ... or whether the global climate has begun warming up'
(13).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | global | rhetoric |
Spellmeyer conceives of 'language as a way of deliberately seeing and
acting on a world that is recast through seeing and acting themselves. While no
one invents language ex nihilo, while no one speaks without institutional
constraints -- and while, in addition, the speaking self is to some degree a
linguistic "construction" -- the act of speaking or writing always exposes past
knowledge to the ordeal of the present, exposes the general to the burden of the
particular, and the conventional to the test of the extraconventional. Precisely
because writing reconceives the given, it involves still another activity overlooked
by the proponents of objective assessment -- I mean, of course persuasion.
Beginning with difference, and proceeding through difference, writing constantly
seeks to overcome difference retrospectively by presenting the writer's insights
to an audience whose assent must be secured' (19).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | audience |
construction |
difference |
knowledge |
language |
objective |
persuasion |
world |
writing |
'Not a skill, not an art, persuasion is the struggle, perpetually on shifting
terms, to establish a domain of intersubjectivity' (19).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | domain | persuasion |
'[The] attempt to get behind culture and language presupposed the
existence of an invariant "real world" writing situation -- rather than writing for
business, or for history class, or for one's mother -- as well as a standard
definition of success' (20).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | culture | definition |
history |
language |
situation |
standard |
world |
writing |
According to Spellmeyer, constructionists would have us believe: 'Each
community has its own distinctive mode of cognition, its own characteristic "flow
chart" for problem solving. Psychologists do not think first and then practice
psychology: strictly speaking, the discipline of psychology preordains the nature
of thought for its practitioners. Whatever we perceive, then, is a construct,
something constructed by communities, and whatever we have learned derives
not from experience but from a process of initiation into those rituals of
community life that create both selves and worlds' (22).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | cognition | community |
construct |
discipline |
mode |
nature |
problem |
psychology |
thought |
However, Spellmeyer posits: 'Were it not for differences between
individuals, and for miscarriages in practical application, knowledge might
indeed be communal and self-referential just as the constructionists believe. But
regardless of how carefully we draw the boundaries of a community, regardless
of how like-minded its members may seem, these members will sometimes find
themselves at odds over fundamental issues.... The history of any discipline is a
history of just such discordant moments because knowledge can never entirely
escape its historical and institutional blindnesses, and our own everyday practice
takes those blindnesses into account' (23).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | community | discipline |
history |
knowledge |
'Implicit in Habermas' schema is the recognition that a disciplinary practice,
on the part of either individuals or entire communities, does not make sense in
itself and cannot be studies exclusively from an insider's point of view. The
purpose of medicine, for example, is not the practice of medicine' (25).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | implicit | purpose |
recognition |
schema |
'Hermeneutic and "philosophical", our reformed metaempiricists would start
from the conviction that no one simply "behaves", manipulated and ventriloquized
by psychological imperatives, but that we all consciously act in response to
experience and reflection, even if the historical sources of this action, no less
than its subconscious motives and ultimate consequences, fall outside our
immediate circle of awareness' (27).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | action |
conviction |
hermeneutic |
To survey every language as we need to now, from the broader, hermeneutic
perspective, is not to emulate the "social sciences" of a generation past, when
the stress fell on the second term, still less would our practice take its cue from
somewhat harder versions of research, such as linguistics or psychology.
Composition on the terms I have argued for here would more closely resemble
what Turner calls processual anthropology. As a form of engaged, politicized
inquiry into speech and writing, a processual composition would continually
struggle to recall the larger, always changing dimension of public life. 'Through
this struggle of recollection, our field might discharge its institutional task --
teaching students how to write -- while at the same time affirming the possibility
of a knowledge without domination and a commonality without coercion'
(28).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | anthropology |
composition |
form |
hermeneutic |
knowledge |
language |
linguistics |
perspective |
psychology |
recollection |
research |
teaching |
term |
writing |
'Whatever else the everything-is-language argument might do, it gives the
teacher a new ... alibi for ignoring social differences. Who needs to listen to
students when language is always the speaker?' (28).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | argument | language |
speaker |
Last Modified:
July-12-96 10:35:14
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