Wednesday, July 5, 2006

Phelps, "The Domain of Composition"

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. "The Domain of Composition." Rhetoric Review 4 (1986): 182-95.

Phelps frames the field of composition studies by identifying its domain, a term she uses both as "a scene of action" and also "a space one controls." Tracing through each of these senses of "domain," Phelps accounts for the field in 1986 by moving through three sections: I. Core; II. Margins; and, III. Vision. A disciplinary domain, according to Phelps, has these elements: "a group of inquirers, a characteristic attitude toward phenomena, the objects of inquiry themselves, the means of inquiry, its purposes, and scenic factors" (2). Because written discourse is central to our work, compositionists themselves become entangled with their research; teaching, after all, depends upon symbolic action not only as an object of study, but as a kind of activity. Phelps acknowledges the uses of "performance" to describe what happens when reading writing texts; she explains the tension between naturalistic views of language view it as best left to its own developmental trajectories and, on the other hand, school-directed approaches to literacy education that adopt "skill" as a way to account for the "indeterminate and fluctuating" competencies that range between experts and non-experts. She also points out that "some of the linguistic, cognitive, and social knowledge needed to coordinate [reading and writing] activities must be studied consciously before it can become tacit in use" (7). In discussing the margins or borders of composition studies with other disciplines, Phelps calls for "syntopical research" (15). The core of composition studies as she accounts for it here is oriented "to symbolic interaction and from development" (14).

"My object is to push outward from the expanding conceptual core of the domain, defined in terms of symbolic action, to its margins, where composition encounters other disciplines and recognizes its own limits" (2).

"[Shoptalk] offers a vocabulary of distinctions among such concepts as technique, skill, strategy, tactics, craft, art, know-how, and knowledge" (8).

"Recent research has submitted this idea [production w/o consideration of reading or consumption] of writing to a critique and moves toward integrating the writer's composing act into a more comprehensive notion of written discourse as a complex social process by which discoursers co-construct meaning" (3).

"That is to say, written discourse as symbolic action can only be understood ecologically, in terms of its rich interactions among acts, meanings, and reality, rather than by a reduction of its texture to ideal elements and rules" (4).

"event psychology" (17), "natural attitude" (6), "personal development" (9), "keyed" (Goffman) (13), "literacy as a power to act in the world" (10), "a network of primary discourse acts" (13)

Related sources:
Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, UCalifornia Press, 1968.
Vygotsky, Thought and Language. Alex Kozulin, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986.
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