The Writer's Audience Is Always Fiction: Walter J. Ong
The relationship, of the so-called"audience" to writing as such, to the situation that inscribed communication establishes and to the roles that readers as readers are consequently called on to play: Study of the history of readers and their enforced roles
Differentiation between speech and writing was never a major concern for rhetoric
Histories of the relationship between literature and culture say something about the status and behavior of readers, before and after reading given materials, as do mass media studies, readership surveys, books on reading skills, works of literary criticism, and works on linguistics, especially those addressing differences between hearing and reading.
Written word can neutralize time by preserving the info and conquer space by moving the info to its recipient over distances that sound cannot transverse: might be the same with oral info now as tech has developed to record, etc.
Written word often cannot contain the complicated and nuanced meanings conveyed orally: part of present actuality and has meaning by the situation in which it comes into being; speaker, those being addressed
The person with whom the writer addresses is usually not present at all
The writer writes to or for readers
A writing success might be bc the writer can fictionalize an audience they have learned from earlier writers who were fictionalizing audiences they knew from earlier writers and so on
There exists a tradition in fictionalizing an audience
Writer must construct in his imagination an audience cast in a role
Audience must then fictionalize itself
Reader has to play the role in which the author has cast them
An oral narrator calls on his audience to fictionalize itself to some extent but a real audience controls the narrator's behavior immediately
Academic reader: Knowledge of the degrees of acceptable ignorance for readers is absolutely essential if one is to publish successful
Letters are interesting: one ways movements
Diary probably fictionalizes the reader most
the fundamental deep paradox of writing: at least when writing moves from its initial account-keeping purposes to other more elaborate concerns more directly and
complexly involving human persons in their manifold dealings with one another
Marks in everyday communication
Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy: Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford
wish to expand understanding of the role audience plays in composition theory and pedagogy by demonstrating that the arguments on each side (audience invoked and audience addressed) oversimplify meaning through written discourse
Failed to recognize 1) the fluid, dynamic character options; and 2) the integrated, interdependent nature of reading and writing
Audience Addressed:
Those who envision audience as addressed emphasize the concrete reality the writer's audience; they also share the assumption that knowledge of the audience's attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible but essential
Source of imbalance in Mitchell and Taylor's formulation is to note that they are right in emphasizing the creative role of readers who, they observe, "actively contribute to the meaning of what they read and will respond according to a complex set of expectations, preconceptions, and provocations", but wrong in failing to recognize the equally essential role writers play throughout the composing process not only as creators but also as readers of their own writing
Missing: from the perspective of audience as addressed, is a recognition of the crucial importance of internal dialogue, through which writers analyze inventional problems and conceptualize patterns of discourse
Missing: awareness that as they compose writers must rely in large part upon their own vision of the reader, which they create, as readers do their vision of writers, according to their own experiences and expectation
Missing: underestimate relationship between style and substance
Missing: oversimplified view of language
Audience Invoked:
stress that the audience of a written discourse is a construction of the writer, a "created fiction”
Argue that writers simply cannot know this reality in the way that speakers can
writer uses the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader---cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text
When one turns to precise, concrete situations, the relationship bet can become far more complex than Ong represents
Every writer must create a role for the reader but the constraints on the writer and the potential sources of and possibilities both more complex and diverse
each rhetorical situation is unique and thus requires the writer, catalyzed and guided by a strong sense of purpose, to solutions
distorts the processes of writing and reading by overemphasizing the power of the writer and undervaluing that of the reader
Rhetoric and its Situations:
"Contact Zones" and English Studies: Patricia Bizzell
underlying structure of English studies that still makes us think our scholarship must be organized along national or chronological lines
need a radically new system to organize English studies and propose to develop it in response to the materials with which we are now working: try to find new forms that seem to spring from and respond to the new materials
Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone: refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and g with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today
A "contact zone" is defined primarily in terms of historical circumstances
in terms of historically defined contact zones, moments when different groups within the society contend for the power to interpret what is going on