A good weekend all around. Husband had a bike race in Chattanooga, and later that evening, I crashed into a sign warning people to watch out for baby deer. In the middle of the fun, Jonathan Potter reminded me that so many scholars are still firmly entrenched in antiquated definitions of text.
If discourse analysis is the systematic and rigorous study of language in use, and if consumers are tending towards imagistic symbol trading, then why isn't DA getting on board with less traditional types of analysis? According to Potter, "While we can watch television with the sound turned down, and flick through the daily newspaper looking just at the pictures, our entertainment and cultural life is massively dependent on what the actors are saying and what the newspaper stories tell" (2007, p. 607). DA has fought for legitimacy alongside other qualitative methods (though DA seems to carry more signs of quantitative than other approaches), and considering this status, it seems that practitioners should look outside the borders of what constitutes a text and what constitutes discourse (and who gets to say). Can we conduct a discourse-based analysis on an exchange of images? How about discourse that is text on one end (English 101 syllabus) and oral on the other (student's impression of 101 syllabus). Must both parties be able to "speak back" in real time to constitute discourse? (Yes, in most definition of DA there must be an interlocator and a perlocator, as dialog is exchanged.) What about our discussion in class on using video?
So the field moves slowly in accepting definitions of text, much like it does in its definitions of academic texts. For example, I am interested in ethnopoetics and its inclusion in my dissertation. Gee's method as outlined in Burck ("Comparing qualitative research methodologies for systemic research: The use of grounded theory, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis) offers ethnopoetics as just another mode of analysis (REMINDER: get Gee article before prospectus defense). However, I see ethnopoetics as a viable product of analysis, not simply a tool for reckoning.
This is where my opinion differs from that of a number of hiring committee's. The single-author text is still the "best" kind, according to a kind-of-recent MLA article. But I see what we produce in classes such as 531 and also as production of Discourse Analysis and Narrative Analysis as collaborative, reciprocal in many cases, and polyvocal (as through the use of narrative and ethnopoetics).
If we can't change our departments, how can we work toward building a subfield that makes room for these kinds of texts? Maybe it's only in English that the single author is still the only author of consequence.
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2 comments:
I'm beginning to wonder who cares...but AMEN! It puzzles me that Potter is not more inclusive (heck, I'd like him to just get to a level of validity on the interpersonal communication first!). I can hear Horace rolling around in his grave, screaming "ut pictura poesis, et ut poesia picturae!"
And while I agree with your comments on single-authorship, I always wonder how that plays out in research, because some disciplines just don't jive with certain others, IMHO. Potter concedes that for DA, even though "some concerns are shared, disciplinary home typically inflects method and research questions in significant ways". I can see SLA and rhetoric playing nice together...but SLA and Math Ed.? But maybe I'm an unwitting victim of disciplinary turf warfare...
I do tend to think of discipline-based methods and research questions as fluid, so I can imagine a world where a Math Ed. person wants to look into language acquisition. There are, indeed, people in the English Department who can't envision anyone on our floor doing any work that isn't straight-up text based. Of course, I'm a fan of disciplinary hybridity, though I do recognize that departments tend to consolidate around similar broad beliefs manifested through research agendas and approaches.
What I was getting at with my single-author rant is that on my home turf, collaboration isn't that welcome unless it's in the field of composition... and sometimes, but rarely, rhetoric. The "softer," more service (i.e., applied) fields are allowed to collaborate, while the "true" scholarship of the discipline remains a one-person job. There's some romantic ideal of the lonely, half-blind scholar wasting away in the archives, penning his magnum opus. Writing, it's assumed, should be isolated and isolating, even though we teach the social aspects of writing in first-year composition (or at least some of us do). I'm also coming out of a creative writing tradition, and how many collaborative poems do you really see out there? It frustrates me.
My point (which is elusive because I'm tired) is this: yay for collaboration!
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