“Invention and Identification Through Intertextual Appropriation of Academic Discourse”

by George Shamshayooadeh | Xchanges 9.1

Introduction

In the light of prevalent and ubiquitous intertextual relations in academic texts, there is an acute, palpable need to develop writing instruction that addresses students’ often insufficient requisite background knowledge (e.g. schemata) as well as understanding of intertextual relations at both the receptive and productive ends of the composing process (Porter; Bazerman). Indeed, the need for students to read about the disciplinary debates in order to become familiar with arguments and issues within the proverbial Burkean parlor is clearly needed. The presence of underprepared students who are not ready to tackle the demands of expository and argumentative writing at the post-secondary level, which has been reported by Ann M. Johns and others, provides us with the exigence to revamp the teaching of writing in such a way that takes account of the interconnectivity of texts at conceptual and linguistic levels.

Johns — who for years directed the American Language Institute, the Writing Across the Curriculum Program, and the Center for Teaching and Learning at San Diego State University — reports that “discipline specific faculty who teach novices at the undergraduate level … sometimes complain that their students ‘do not like to write like academics’ or ‘cannot comprehend’ academic prose, arguing that these are general abilities that we should be teaching” (505). As Judy Parr aptly notes, students’ writing is often perceived as weak compared to their knowledge and performance in other subjects such as reading and Mathematics. Additionally, William J. Torgerson’s following statement is typical of many instructors’ experiences in developmental and first-year composition classes: “In the first stack of papers I collected, I read a lot of thinly researched projects about abortion, capital punishment, and violence in the media” (87).

Thus, a new approach to writing instruction with new pedagogical implications is called for. In this paper, I will propose an intertextual approach to composition instruction, grounded in theories of intertextuality as well as the Bakhtinian notions of addressivity, heteroglossia, and dialogism, in order to provide a rich rhetorical and conceptual framework that would facilitate student writing, particularly in terms of appropriation and application of texts and the means to achieving persuasion through Burkean identification via positionality.

Despite the influence that Bakhtinian theories and terms have exerted in literary and cultural studies as well as in genre studies, their influence in composition studies has been relatively modest. Given the fact that heteroglossia exists fundamentally as a characteristic of language and not merely of the novel, it can potentially be used not only critically to shed light on argumentative and expository writing as practiced in college composition classes, but also productively to generate a more detailed intertextual practice in student writing.

In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin elaborates on the multiplicity of languages, dialects, idiolects, and other variations of language that constitute the social stratifications of language:

In any given historical moment of verbal-ideological life, each generation at each social level has its own language; moreover, its own vocabulary, its own particular accentual system that, in their turn, vary depending on social level, academic institution (the language of the cadet, the high school student, the trade school student are all different languages) and other stratifying factors. (290)

Charles Bazerman defines intertextuality as “The explicit and implicit relations that a text or utterance has to prior, contemporary and potential future texts” (86). Although intertextual relations are generally acknowledged, these interrelations are often simplistically reduced to quoting and paraphrasing in composition classes without situating them as part of an overarching conceptual and pedagogical framework. Students’ violations and misappropriations of writing conventions range from organization and arrangement of the material to language, style, and diction issues. I would contend that adopting a dialogic, intertextual approach to writing instruction that incorporates multiple texts on a given topic and explicitly expounds and highlights their various intertextual relations would be instrumental to student-writers’ formation of authorial and textual identities.