Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
34. that whole intro w/Adso and his "lesser library...of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books" is as pretty as what disney's done to narnia.
35. the downer view: "authorial intention is less significant than social context; the writer is simply a part of a discourse tradition, a member of a team, and a participant in a community of discourse that creates its own collective meaning. thus the intertext constrains meaning"; poststructuralists as exemplified by Vincent Leitch: "the text is not an autonomous or unified object, but a set of relations with other texts. its system of language, its grammar, its lexicon, drag along numerous bits and pieces--traces--of history so that the text resembles a Cultural Salvation Army Outlet with unaccountable collections of incomplete ideas, beliefs, and sources"; "the traditional notion of the text as a single work of a given author, and even the very notions of author and reader, are regarded as simply convenient fictions for domesticating discourse"
35. 2 types of intertextuality: iterability = "the 'repeatability' of certain textual fragments, to citation...[and] also unannounced sources and influences, clichés, phrases in the air, and traditions" & presupposition = the things we can count on readers filling in that we don't have to say--that "once upon a time" means a made up story or something meant to seem like one, that there's such thing as time, that narratives are linear & this one will start at a beginning.
36. the Declaration of Independence: "Jefferson was by no means an original framer or a creative genius....[but] was a skilled writer...chiefly because he was an effective borrower of traces" taken "consciously or unconsciously from his culture's Text"; "the most memorable phrases in the Declaration seem to be the least Jefferson's," congress made "eighty-six changes" to the document & did the most changing to the parts that were the most original.
36. "the idea of Jefferson as author is but convenient shorthand. actually, the Declaration arose out of a cultural and rhetorical milieu, was composed of traces--and was, in effect, team written"; Jefferson's work was "helping to mold and articulate the milieu," "creating the all-important draft" and "his ability to borrow traces effectively and to find appropriate contexts for them." halliday: "creativity does not consist in producing new sentences...[but] in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the potentiality of language for the indefinite extension of its resources to new contexts of situation"
38. because of how important presuppositions are to the creation of meaning, "the intertext exerts its influence partly in the form of audience expectation"; the "audience...is as responsible for its production as the writer....in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse"
39. audiences & meaning-making = discourse communities: "a text is 'acceptable' within a forum only insofar as it reflects the community episteme (to use Foucault's term)"
40. "a poststructuralist rhetoric examines how audience (in the form of community expectations and standards) influences textual production and, in so doing, guides the development of the writer"; thereby "the lone inspired writer and the sacred autonomous text....take a pretty hard knock. genuine originality is difficult" & "genius is possible, but it may be constrained" (one can, F again, "speak the truth" without being "within the true")
41. "successful writing helps to redefine the matrix--and in that way becomes creative": "every new text has the potential to alter the Text in some way; in fact, every text admitted into a discourse community changes the constitution of the community"; "we are constrained insofar as we must inevidably borrow the traces, codes, and signs which we inherit and which our discourse community imposes. we are free insofar as we do what we can to encounter and learn new codes, to intertwine codes in new ways, and to expand our semiotic potential--with our goal being to effect change and establish our identities within the discourse communities we choose to enter"

pedagogy
41. "the intertext of our discipline" still believes "that writing is individual, isolated, and internal," "glorif[ies] the individual essayists," and "assumes...an automonous writer exercising a free creative will through the writing act"
42. but what about: "to what extent is the writer's product itself a part of a larger community writing process? how does the discourse community influence writers and readers within it?" esp. when "talking about writing in terms of 'social forces influencing the writer' raises the specter of determinism and so is anathema." bartholomae: "carrying out ritual activities" is part of it, & those rituals exist/are created by communities; barthes: "the 'i' which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite"; williams (paraphrased): "pre-socialized writers are not sufficiently immersed in their discourse community to produce competent discourse: they do not know what can be presupposed, are not conscious of the distinctive intertexuality of the community, may be only superficially acquainted with explicit conventions"; neo: "our long-range goal might be 'post-socialized writers,' those who have achieved such a degree of confidence, authority, power, or achievement in the discourse community so as to become part of the regulating body. they are able to vary conventions and question assumptions--i.e. effect change in communities--without fear of exclusion," they are able to change the Matrix.
43. "intertextuality suggests that they proper focus of audience analysis is not the audience as receivers per se, but the intertext of the discourse community": "what are the conventional presuppositions of this community? in what forums do they assemble? what are the methodological assumptions? what is considered 'evidence,' 'valid argument,' and 'proof'?" (& just like the genre awareness argument): "a critical reading of the discourse of a community may be the best way to understand it"; "writing assignments should be explicitly intertextual," making clear that "the individual writer's work is part of a web, part of a community search for truth and meaning"; "research assignments might be more community oriented rather than topic oriented"; & "the key criteria for evaluating writing should be 'acceptability' within some discourse community"--how well students do at "adopting the community's discourse values--and of course borrowing the appropriate traces"
44. reality again: "the writer is constrained by the community, and by its intertextual preferences and prejudices, but the effective writer works to assert the will against those community constraints to effect change" & our students "need to see...the Adsos of the world, not just the Aristotles...writers whose products are more evidently part of a larger process and whose work more clearly produces meaning in social contexts"
45 (n4). "Robert Scholes puts it this way: 'if you play chess, you can only do certain things with the pieces, otherwise you are not playing hcess. but those constraints in themselves do not tell you what moves to make"