Perspectives
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To give some idea
of the general organisation and content of this volume, I shall now briefly
present each of our authors and their respective contributions, while at the
same time attempting to position them and their work within the wider context
of the international writing research community which the San Marino event
sought to promote. |
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Broadly speaking,
three threads in current writing research are woven into the contributions in
this volume. The first has its roots in anthropological, ethnological and
ethnographic tradition of inquiry, offering a broad perspective on literacy
development in a wider sense within a transcultural, evolutionary and
historical framework. A key figure in this tradition is Jack Goody, whose
thought and work we shall meet in some more detail a bit later on. |
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The second
thread might perhaps be characterised by the etiquette Ôliterature and genre
studiesÕ. In electing to use such an etiquette, however, we run the risk of
trying to put a highly complex field of scientific inquiry into a tidy
definitional bag, while it would probably be best left to define and develop
itself through its own doings. Another etiquette which might be applied here,
with similar risks, is Ôrhetoric studiesÕ. But in any case, and whatever we
might choose to call it, this thread includes work in a time-honoured
tradition which aims to identify genres of written (and spoken) discourse,
and to understand what it is that makes them ÔefficientÕ (or not) as forms of
written (and spoken) communication. The tradition of rhetorical inquiry can
be traced back to Aristotle's Poetics
and Rhetoric in the 5th
century, and appears in good health and continuing development today. A good
presentation of recent work in this tradition, including a couple of
stimulating pieces by Carolyn Miller and Anne Freadman, both of whom have
contributions in this present volume, is Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway's
1994 anthology: Genre and the New Rhetoric. Other chapters in the present volume associated
with this tradition are those by Carol Berkenkotter and Tom Huckin. |
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The third
thread is more clearly ÔsemioticÕ in tone, and even less clearly definable in
terms of ÔetiquetteÕ than those already mentioned. Semiotics is, after all, a
field of potentially unlimited scope. Work more or less loosely associated
with this thread combines a plurality of perspectives woven into a web of
research domains known as cultural, social and textual semiotics. Some is
rooted in the American pragmatist tradition Ð with the philosophy of Charles
Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) as guiding light, and William James (1842-1910),
John Dewey (1859-1952) and Charles Morris (1901-1979) as reformers and
promoters of this basic perspective. Other work is rooted in European
structuralist semiotics, with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and Louis
Hjelmslev (1899-1965) as main its proponent and reformer-moderniser. |
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Today we find
the structuralist tradition most strongly reflected in Greimassian textual
and narrative semiotics. But also in Hallidayian social semiotics and
systemic functional linguistics there are strong structuralist influences.
The latter school, which has grown up in the active and innovative applied
linguistics environment of southern Australia, maintains links to similar
environments all over the world, and with the critical discourse analysis
community in the north of Europe, especially in Great Britain and
Scandinavia. The critical discourse movement, being rather less formal in
approach (see Martin 1998 for some discussion of this point), has certain
aspects in common with pragmatist cultural and textual semiotics, which is
predominantly interpretational in tenor, rather than structurally oriented.
In Europe at least, the
interpretational tradition is most clearly represented in strands of thought
woven through Umberto EcoÕs extensive exegeses in semiotics, philosophy of
language, literary and cultural semiotics. Here, the meaning potential of
mass-media and other forms of text Ð
seen as culturally coded systems of signs with a powerful potential
for stimulating and maintaining processes of reinterpretation and
recontextualisation Ð is an object of scientific study in itself. |
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Casting a
sideways glance from here in the direction of Eastern European and Soviet
traditions of textual semiotics, we find historical and conceptual links to
the Peircean semiotic and Russian formalist traditions, as well as
structuralism. Here we recall names such as Tvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin,
Boris Uspenskij, Roman Jacobsen and Juri Lotman. In the United States,
especially inspired by Peircean pragmatism, names such as Thomas Sebeok,
Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish spring readily to mind. In the present volume
work associated with this thread is that of Kjell-Lars Berge, Patrick
Coppock, Lars Evensen, Martin Nystrand, Finn Bostad, Anna-Malin Karlsson and
Jim Martin, while Anne FreadmanÕs work very successfully manages to bridge
the conceptual space between the tradition of genre studies and pragmatism. |
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In what
follows I have tried to group my presentation of the various contributions to
the present volume loosely together with respect to potential affiliations to
the three threads of discourse mentioned above. But, as the astute reader
will very quickly understand on reading the articles themselves, there is so
much overlapping of interest and thematic matter across the whole range of
research perspectives and directions covered in these fourteen articles,
that, in the end these even quite vague content categorisations turn out in
the long run of things to be far too specificÉ |