Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts

2 Forwarding

34 2 Forwarding The painter’s products stand before us as though they were still alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence . It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. —Plato, Phaedrus The dead, thing-like text has potentials far outdistancing those of the simply spoken word. —Walter Ong,“Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought” Academic writing is often described as a kind of conversation. You read a text, you talk about it, you put down some thoughts in response , others respond to your comments, and so on. Or as the poet, novelist, philosopher, and critic Kenneth Burke once put it: Imagine that you enter a parlor.You come late.When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion has begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone on before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; Forwarding 35 Intertexts Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 110ë11. David Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” in When A Writer Can’t Write, ed. Mike Rose (New York: Guilford, 1985), 134. another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally’s assistance. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. Others have drawn on this metaphor to imagine the various disciplines and professions as being, in effect, different sorts of conversations —each with its own rules of evidence and etiquette. In this view, to become a lawyer, a historian, a biologist, or a social worker, you need to learn to think and talk like a lawyer, a historian, a biologist, or a social worker. Learning a subject means acquiring a discourse, not just mastering a body of knowledge. As another teacher of academic writing, David Bartholomae, has argued: Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion—invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. This metaphor of writing as conversation has several strengths. It highlights the social aspects of intellectual work, the ways in which academic writing responds to the texts and ideas of others. It suggests that the goal of such writing is not to have the final word on a subject, to bring the discussion to a close, but to push it forward, to say something new, something that seems to Intertexts In this sense, the passage I’ve quoted fails to suggest the larger aim of Burke’s writing, which was to theorize a “rhetoric of courtship,” a discourse that strives for agreement rather than confrontation, identification rather than division. See Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 36 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts call for further talk and writing. And despite Burke’s somewhat militaristic talk of allies and opponents, the metaphor also hints at the more civil tone of much academic work. A dialogue is not a debate. You don’t win a conversation , you add to it, push it ahead, keep it going,“put your oar in,” and maybe even sometimes redirect or divert the flow of talk. But you rarely win over a person you are speaking with by first refuting what she or he has just said. The arts of conversation are subtler than those of debate; they join our need to articulate the differences among us with our need to keep talking with...