Ong: The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction (Dani):
● One difference between speech and writing: audience’s role
○ Not explored in depth by others
○ Role called for synchronically(?) or diachronically(?)
● Merleau-Ponty: words are never fully determined in their abstract signification but have meaning only with relation to man’s body and to its interaction with its surroundings
● Context for spoken word is already present
● No proper word yet for reader/writer version of audience
● The writer must construct in his imagination an audience cast in role
● A reader has to play the role in which the author had cast him
● At first, fictionalizing the readers was easy: first texts were merely a transcription of oral narratives
● Hemingway uses “the” instead of “a” to fictionalize reader as someone with whom he has shared experiences
● Oral storytelling is a two-way street
○ Depending on audience, speech differs
○ No way to adjust to friend’s real mood in writing
● “Masks are inevitable in all human communication”
Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: 13th reading
>How can we best defined the audience of a written discourse?
>Often times, people think of only two option: for or against the emphasis of audience in writing
>Many people who envision audience, have been influenced by tradition of audience analysis in speech writing
>Goal is a shared view
>Mitchell and Taylor have a model on audience addressed with 4 components: writer, written product, audience, and response.
>In Audience invoked, the writer uses the "semantic and syntactic resources of language to provides cues for the reader-cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes th reader to adopt in responding to the text"
>Ong's thesis says two things: "What do we mean by saying the audience is a fiction? First that the writer must construct in his/her imagination, clearly or vaguely an audience cast in some sort of role; second, we mean that the audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself.
Bizzell: Opinion (Dani):
● Professors do not want to diversify teaching literature
● Author proposes racially new system to organize English studies
● Central business of English studies?
○ Contact zone: social spaces where cultures meet, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power (colonialism, slavery, etc)
● Most revealing speech situation for understanding language: gathering of people who each spoke two languages and understood a third, but held only one language in common with any of the others
● Author suggests organizing English studies not in terms of literary or chronological periods, but in terms of historically defined contact zones
○ Study texts as they respond to contact zone conditions