Cinnabar and Alabaster

unwitting position statement? ix: "to the extent that writing is an individual act, i am of course responsible for the arguments made here. but to the extent that writing is also a collective act, a great many people deserve full recognition for their tangible and intangible support during the years that i worked on this project"

definitions:
when writing about "the interdependence of writers and readers in the academic community," "culture and community" are "contingent terms of analysis" whereby culture is the term for "referring to what members of a group know, or could learn, about language conventions" and community refers to "cultural practices, in this instance...what academic writers and readers do with their knowledge": "the Academy" is "a culture" and "the academic community [is] a specific group within that culture whose members organize their professional lives around" its demands (7).

from hymes: language field = "the languages an individual knows"; speech field = "the number of communities whose rules of discourse and individual knows" & speech network = "a way to describe how and where people put their knowledge to use--who in fact speaks to whom and under what circumstances" (paralleled with "what [she] earlier defined as community")(18-19).

passages
21. "interdisciplinary study is not primarily a commitment to a method, but to a topic. consequently, in interdisciplinary studies, a particular axiology rather than a method links one text to another. needless to say, then, texts are related to one another as beads in a necklace, rather than as beads on a string. this being the case, textuality is less a matter of individual beads and more a matter of the relationship between the beads and the necklace" (this is here because i don't know what it means, but the metaphor & its opacity intrigues me. wtf, lb?)
23. "learning to read and write academic prose is...a matter of learning conventions, such as whom to cite and when to do so, for those conventions are part of the cultural repertoire of all academics. in the doing--in the reading and writing of academic prose--the academic practices that ensue from this shared cultural knowledge are, however, material choices that are made. hence, when they interpret and evaluate their own and one another's prose, academics are positioning themselves in relation to both academics and nonacademics. and in so doing, they choose academic ideologies as well as thir fields and disciplines: which topics are academic; which methods are appropriate for research; what political profile to represent within the academic community, as they perceive it; and what politic, to practice outside their community. so to the extent that academics inherit a culture, but literally construct a practice out of the material resources of that culture, including the language in which to voice committments to things academic, one might say that academics are what they read and write and publish.
30. "the more one thinks about it, the more one suspects that even faint praise from someone in the community is thought to be preferable to any amount of adulation outside the community" <--she's talking about the academy again, but isn't this generally true for communities of discourse/influence/etc. anyway?
36. "network" is a better term than "community" for describing how discourse-groups (s.a. academics) interact; "community is...a word teetering on sentimentality, a notion which, because it betrays no tentions...promises much by stipulating very little," but "social network is sociology's attempt to substantiate empirically the sense of community" b/c it's "consistently described in terms of observable social practices": so "what is meant by community might be better understood as a social network or, even more likely, as a collectivity if interdependent social networks"
76. atomism = the modernist "notion that the individual is an atomic, self-referring unit" (re: alienation)
114-5. the collaborating writers she studied, in her description "each harbored hopes that learning would be unevenly distributed, that the extensive committment to a particular version of feminism and feminist literary study that each brought to the project would be affirmed. in short, each wished to be the other's teacher rather than student" even though "both...professed to believe that they entered the collaboration evenly qualified" and that "the apparent disparaty between their academic status and credentials did not obviate the more crucial fact that each felt susceptible, even vulnerable, to arguments asserted by the other"
119. there's something valuable--but i can't pin down yet what--about bill's "plan" & how him bringing the plan in set the stage for the collaboration going the way he envisioned it--or resisting his envisioning, but either way being defined, positively or negatively, by that claiming move. is that a good thing or a bad thing, a constructive act or a limiting one? (ok, both, but which way does it lean, if it consistently does, or what makes it wobble?)
141. there's also something valuable about how he thought they were collaborating about & somewhat also through feminism whereas she saw collaboration as feminism in action.