The Evolution of Audience in Composition Theories And
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THE EVOLUTION OF AUDIENCE IN COMPOSITION THEORIES AND PRACTICES By Jacob Knight A Project Presented to The Faculty of Humboldt State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English: Composition Studies and Pedagogy Dr. Michael Eldridge, Program Graduate Coordinator Committee Membership Dr. Laurie Pinkert, Committee Chair Dr. David Stacey, Committee Member May 2015 ABSTRACT THE EVOLUTION OF AUDIENCE IN COMPOSITION THEORIES AND PRACTICES Jacob Knight Notions of “audience” have evolved and expanded over the past four decades. This piece will cover how the reader-writer relationship has developed within a framework shifting from cognitive to more socially constructed in nature. It will then detail the 21st century shift toward composing with digital media, and how the relationship between a writer and his or her reader has been significantly altered by bringing both roles into the same discursive space. Ultimately, this piece informs instructors to be aware of the developments in audience theory, and concludes by discussing how the work of Powell and Dangler et al. promotes far more authentic and socially constructed notions of audience within a writing classroom than more standard pedagogical applications. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to both Laurie Pinkert and David Stacey for their wisdom, guidance and support. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE: (RE)DEFINING “AUDIENCE” ....................................................................... 5 Cognitive Notions of Audience .................................................................................................. 6 Breaking Down “Audience”..................................................................................................... 10 The “Social Perspective”.......................................................................................................... 17 CHAPTER TWO: “AUDIENCE” AS DISCURSIVELY SITUATED ........................................ 19 Socially Constructed Notions of Audience .............................................................................. 20 Debating “Audience’s” Usefulness .......................................................................................... 23 The Multiple, Overlapping Audiences of a Written Text ......................................................... 27 CHAPTER THREE: THE INTERACTIVE AUDIENCE ............................................................ 31 Reducing the “Distancing Effect” ............................................................................................ 31 The Relationship between a Rhetor and a 21st Century Audience ............................................ 36 The Increasingly Unstable Roles of “Author” and “Audience” ................................................ 39 CHAPTER FOUR: PEDAGOGICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE ........................................... 42 A (Brief) History of Audience Pedagogy ................................................................................. 43 The Essay and the “Fake” Audience ........................................................................................ 48 Incorporating Authentic Pedagogical Applications .................................................................. 53 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 58 WORKS CITED .......................................................................................................................... 60 iv 1 INTRODUCTION According to James A. Berlin, rhetoric “arises out of a time and place, a peculiar social context, establishing for a period the conditions that make a peculiar kind of communication possible, and then it is altered or replaced by another scheme” (2). The word rhetoric—which derives from the Greek rhetoricus and refers specifically to speaking skills—came into use in a time when the popular means of communication dictated a heavy focus on oration. Although many canonized written works have come out of ancient Greece, the society was still one based primarily in oral traditions. “Politics was conducted orally,” according to Rosalind Thomas. “The citizens of democratic Athens listened in person to the debates in the Assembly and voted on them there and then. Very little was written down and the nearest Greek word for ‘politician’ was ‘orator’ (rhetor)” (Berlin 3). Oral communication was not only the most common form of rhetoric in ancient Greece, but also the most effective; therefore, the audience of the ancient Greek rhetor was an immediate and tangible presence. In the over two thousand years between then and now, however, the focus of rhetoric has shifted almost entirely toward the act of writing and, thus, a more removed audience. Nevertheless, rhetors utilizing the medium of composition have continued to operate under Aristotelian concepts of audience, which posit that rhetoric consists of the discovery of the available means of persuasion from emotional, ethical, and rational (pathos, ethos, logos) standpoints. This has been the primary form of composition in recent years: developing writers are taught how to best accommodate the opinions and beliefs of their audience in 2 order to most successfully convince this audience to adopt a particular perspective. In fact, according to Berlin, this has become the “dominant paradigm for composition instruction in American colleges in the twentieth century” (9). As writing and other forms of discursive media have become more prevalent, however, the need to examine and understand the relationship between a rhetor and his or her audience has become a more frequently discussed topic. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, researchers expanded upon the ideas proposed by Aristotle and other classical rhetoricians, and these revised theories became the framework of what would eventually be referred to as social constructionism. By “rely[ing] on a view of reality as a linguistic construct arising out of a social act,” theorists like Fred Newton Scott, Gertrude Buck, Joseph V. Denney, and their contemporaries—whom Berlin labels Romantic rhetoricians—were envisioning a reader-writer relationship in which “meaning arises out of the interaction of the interlocutor [the rhetor] and the audience” (Berlin 80- 83). While classical understandings of the interaction between a rhetor and his or her audience suggest that demonstrating one’s knowledge eloquently and with purpose is the foundation of rhetoric, Romantic rhetoricians and social constructionists would argue that rhetoric has become more centered on the negotiation of knowledge between a rhetor and his or her audience. Berlin notes that these Romantic notions of the rhetor’s relationship with his or her audience were largely disregarded in the classroom of the early 20th century and soon disappeared. Decades passed before notions of a discursively situated audience began to reemerge within the classroom. 3 Over the past four decades, the relationship between rhetor and audience—and how such a relationship should be approached in the writing classroom—has become a topic of increasingly significant interest among composition researchers, pedagogues, and rhetoricians. Many would argue that the discussion regarding the “true” nature of the role of the audience of a written text began to garner widespread attention in 1975 with the publication of Walter J. Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.” In the years since, however, understandings of audience have been completely reinterpreted. Periodically, as Berlin prophesied about rhetoric in general, the field of composition is met with a sudden influx of publications regarding audience theory, which results in a complete overhaul of how the relationship between an author and his or her audience is perceived. From cognitive theories to social constructionists primarily concerned with digital media, conceptions of “audience” and understandings of the reader-writer relationship have gone through monumental changes over the past 40 years. Until now, though, little effort has been made to synthesize this information into one cohesive literature review. This project will provide a review of the literature on audience within the field of composition in order to argue that the shifts in theory have resulted in a view of “audience” that is far more interactive and dynamic than the ones presented by earlier theorists. While classical conceptions of a rhetor consist of an orator addressing and capitalizing on the preferences and beliefs of his or her audience in order to most effectively accomplish his or her goals, the act of writing is subject to the “distancing effect.” Rebecca Lucy Busker describes the distancing effect in her piece “Virtual Kairos: 4 Audience in Virtual Spaces,” explaining that writers are “seldom in the same physical space as those who will experience their text,” and that such circumstances call for a different