Time: Thursday, 1-4 pm Discourse Across the Disciplines
Fall 1990
Instructor: Bertram Bruce
Place: 389 Education
Office: 387 Education
Dept: Curriculum and Instruction
Phone: 4-3576, 3-0227
Course number: C&l 490 BB
Call number: 08970This course reflects an emerging field of interdisciplinary study that has significant implications for curriculum design and for promoting literacy development. Its primary goal is to help students understand principles relating discourse and practice within a variety of disciplines as they learn to apply methods of discourse analysis. Students should develop a critical understanding of discourse within a specific discipline, and thus be better able to evaluate research in that discipline, as well as research on the teaching and learning of that discipline. One hope (as yet untested) is that through increased self-reflection in inquiry, students should improve their ability to conduct research and to present it effectively to members of a discipline as well as to outsiders.
Discourse forms can be written or spoken; they include conversations, novels, interviews, narratives, journal articles, speeches, instruction manuals, advertisements, and so on. Lexical and syntactic features of the language used by participants in a discourse may index important aspects of the discourse, but the characteristics of the discourse derive from the participants' social relations, including their purposes for engaging in the discourse. For example, one might find a strong similarity among segments of technical discourse at a biology conference, regardless of the national language employed, and great differences across discourses of English speakers who differ in social status, occupation, or cultural background.
The study of discourse is thus the study of how people use language to share ideas and feelings, to influence others, to define and maintain communities, and to make sense of the world. Discourse analysis entails the study of utterances situated in social, cultural, historical, and linguistic contexts. The broad definition of discourse soon leads the discourse analyst beyond any narrow conception of linguistics, into the study of discourse communities, and inter alia, into the way language is used in various fields of inquiry. In this course, we will explore the way discourse varies across communities that are defined by disciplines such as anthropology, biology, history, economics, psychology, literary criticism, and novel writing.
Participation in the Course
Each participant in the class will produce a critique of discourse within a discipline they know well, examining the rhetorical structure of individual texts, and where appropriate, think-aloud protocols, interviews, or observations of practices within the discipline. Other students will serve as readers for this critique. Major portions of the class time will be used for discussions of these on-going projects.
We will read and discuss works of writers such as Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Foucault that address the relations among discourse, community, and institution, as well as more recent works examining specific disciplines, such as that of McCloskey (economics), Scholes (literary theory), Gigerenzer & Murray (psychology), Latour & Woolgar (laboratory science), and Pratt (ethnography). The first three weeks will emphasize general issues in the rhetoric of inquiry. The next six weeks will address discourse within specific disciplines. Weeks 10-13 will examine theoretical conceptions that underly much of this research. Weeks 14 and 15 will focus on educational consequences.
Class meetings will include discussions of similarities and contrasts across disciplines, methodologies for the study of discourse, and concepts such as language, discourse, appropriation, community, communication, and institution.
Schedule (and Outline of Readings)
1. Aug. 23 Introduction to the course
2. Aug. 30 The rhetorics of inquiry
Aristotle (1931). Rhetoric. Book 111 (trans. by W. R. Roberts; Great Books reprint). In W. D. Ross (Ed.), The Works of Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bartholomae, D. (1986). Inventing the university. 1. of Basic Writing, 5, 4-23.
Nelson, J. S., Megill, A., & McCloskey, D. N. (1987). Rhetoric of inquiry. In J. S. Nelson, A. Megill, & D. N. McCloskey (Eds.), The rhetoric of the human sciences: Language and argument in scholarship and public affairs, pp. 3-18. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
3. Sept. 6 Academic discourse
Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaeing written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science [pp. 18-55]. Madison, Wl: University of Wisconsin Press.
4. Sept. 13 Ethnography
Pratt, M. L. (1986). Fieldwork in common places. In J. Clifford, & G. E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and eolitics of ethnography, pp. 27-50. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rosaldo, R. (1987). Where objectivity lies: The rhetoric of anthropology. In Nelson, et al., pp. 87-110.
5. Sept. 20 Laboratory science
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts (rev. ed.) [pp. 105-150]. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
6. Sept. 27 Economics
McCloskey, D. N. (1985). The rhetoric of economics [pp. 113137]. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
7. Oct. 4 Psychology
Bazerman, C. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as behavioristic rhetoric. In Nelson, et al., pp. 123-144.
Gigerenzer, G., & Murray, D. J. (1987). Cognition as intuitive statistics [pp. 1-28]. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
8. Oct. 11 Literary theory
McDonald, S. M. (1990). The literary argument and its discursive conventions. In W. Nash (Ed.), The writing _scholar: Studies in academic discourse, pp. 31-62. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Scholes, R. (1985). Textual power: Literary theory and the teaching of English [pp. 1-17]. New Haven: Yale University Press.
9. Oct. 18 Novels
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Heteroglossia in the novel. Excerpt from "Discourse in the novel" in M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialo~ic imagination, pp. 301-331. Austin: The University of Texas Press.
10. Oct. 25 Linguistics of writing
Culler, J. (1987). Toward a linguistics of writing. In N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant, & C. MacCabe, (Eds.), The linguistics of writing: Arguments between language and literature, pp. 173-184. New York: Methuen Inc.
Pratt, M. L. (1987). Linguistic utopias. In Fabb, et al., pp. 4866.
11. Nov. 1 Dialogism
Holquist, M. (1981). The politics of representation. In S. J. Greenblatt (Ed.), Allegory and representation, pp. 163183. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lodge, D. (1987). After Bakhtin. In Fabb, et al., pp. 89-102.
12. Nov. 8 Language in use
Wittgenstein, L. (1968; orig. pub. 1953). Philosophical investigations [pp. 2-39] (trans by G. E. M. Anscombe). New York: Macmillan.
13. Nov. 15 Control of discourse
Foucault, M. (1972). The discourse on language. In M. Foucault (trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith), The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language, pp. 215-237. New York: Pantheon.
Gee, J. (1989). Literacy, discourse, and linguistics. Journal of Education, 171, 5-17.
Gee, J. (1989). What is literacy? Journal of Education, 171, 1 8-25.
14. Nov. 29 Classroom discourse
Michaels, S., & Bruce, B. (1989). Discourses on the seasons. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA.
Cazden, C. (1988). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning [pp. 99-120].
Paley, V. (1981). Wally's stories [pp. 13-19]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
15. Dec. 6 Educational challenges
Bizzell, P. (1986). Foundationalism and anti-foundationalism in composition studies. PRE/TEXT, 7, 37-56.
Boomer, G. (1989). Literacy: the epic challenge beyond progressivism. Engljsh in Australia, No. 89, 4-17.