Current social perspectives on writing and disciplinary enculturation are generally grounded in theories of discourse communities. Although assumptions underlying these theories have been seriously questioned, few studies of situated writing have applied alternate theories. In this article, I explore a sociohistoric notion of disciplinarity in a case study of how a sociology student's dissertation prospectus is negotiated in a graduate seminar. A microhistorical narrative of a response episode in the seminar and subsequent textual revision is contextualized in histories of local activity. Analysis of the seminar response foregrounds emergent, nonlinear, discursively heterogeneous practices of disciplinary sense-making. Analysis of the text foregrounds practices whereby situated histories of textual production and reception are transformed into purified representations of the discipline and the author. Finally, the analysis details how the disciplinary work of revision in this setting was socially distributed and interactively achieved.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Amann, K.
, & Knorr-Cetina, K. (1990). The fixation of (visual) evidence. In M. Lynch & S. Woolgar (Eds.), Representation in scientific practice (pp. 85-122). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1988)
2.
Bakhtin, M. M.
(1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.; M. Holquist, Ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
3.
Bakhtin, M. M.
(1986). Speech genres and other late essays (V. W. McGee, Trans.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
4.
Bazerman, C.
(1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
5.
Bazerman, C.
(1994). Constructing experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
6.
Becher, T.
(1989). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines. Stony Stratford, UK: Society for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press.
7.
Berkenkotter, C.
, & Huckin, T. N. (1993). Rethinking genre from a sociocognitive perspective. Written Communication, 10, 475-509.
8.
Berkenkotter, C.
, Huckin, T. N., & Ackerman, J. (1988). Conventions, conversations, and the writer: Case study of a student in a rhetoric Ph.D. program. Research in the Teaching of English, 22, 9-44.
9.
Berkenkotter, C.
, Huckin, T. N., & Ackerman, J. (1991). Social context and socially constructed texts: The initiation of a graduate student into a writing research community. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dynamics of the professions (pp. 191-215). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
10.
Bizzell, P.
(1982). Cognition, convention, and certainty: What we need to know about writing. PRE/TEXT, 3, 213-243.
11.
Blakeslee, A.
(1992). Inventing scientific discourse: Dimensions of rhetorical knowledge in physics. Dissertation Abstracts International, 53, 08A.
12.
Brandt, D.
(1990). Literacy as involvement: The acts of readers, writers, and texts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
13.
Brandt, D.
(1992). The cognitive as the social: An ethnomethodological approach to writing process research. Written Communication, 9, 315-355.
14.
Brodkey, L.
(1987). Writing ethnographic narratives. Written Communication, 4, 25-50.
15.
Casanave, C. P.
(1992). Cultural diversity and socialization: A case study of a Hispanic woman in a doctoral program in sociology. In D. Murray (Ed.), Diversity as resource: Redefining cultural literacy (pp. 148-182). Alexandria, VA: TESOL.
16.
Casanave, C. P.
(in press). Local interactions: Constructing contexts for composing in a graduate sociology program. In D. Belcher & G. Braine (Eds.), Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
17.
Cazden, C. B.
, Michaels, S., & Tabors, P. (1985). Spontaneous repairs in sharing time narratives. In S. Freedman (Ed.), The acquisition of written language: Revision and response (pp. 51-64). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
18.
Chin, E.
(1993, April). “Pegging” the news: Intertextuality and the development of students' newswriting abilities. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Educational Research, Altanta, GA.
19.
Chiseri-Strater, E.
(1991). Academic literacies: The public and private discourse of university students. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
20.
Clark, G.
, & Doheny-Farina, S. (1990). Public discourse and personal expression: A case study of theory-building. Written Communication, 7, 456-481.
21.
Clifford, J.
, & Marcus, G. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
22.
Cole, S.
(1983). The hierachy of the sciences?American Journal of Sociology, 89, 111-139.
23.
Collins, H. M.
(1985). Changing order. London: Sage.
24.
Cooper, M. M.
(1989). Why are we talking about discourse communities? Or, foundationalism rears its ugly head once more. In M. M. Cooper & M. Holzman (Eds.), Writing as social action (pp. 202-220). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
25.
Coyne, J. C.
(1976). Depression and the response of others. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85, 186-193.
26.
Crane, D.
(1972). Invisible colleges: Diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
27.
Daiute, C.
, & Dalton, B. (1988). “Let's brighten it up a bit:” Collaboration and cognition in writing. In B. A. Rafoth & D. L. Rubin (Eds.), The social construction of written communication (pp. 249-269). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
28.
de Certeau, M.
(1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
29.
Duranti, A.
, & Goodwin, C. (Eds.). (1992). Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomena. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
30.
Flower, L.
, & Hayes, J. R. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32, 365-387.
31.
Flower, L.
, Hayes, J. R., Carey, L., Schriver, K., & Stratman, J. (1986). Detection, diagnosis, and the strategies of revision. College Composition and Communication, 37, 16-55.
32.
Foucault, M.
(1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon.
33.
Freedman, S. W.
(1987). Response to student writing. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
34.
Garfinkel, H.
(1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
35.
Geertz, C.
(1983). Local knowledge. New York: Basic Books.
36.
Geertz, C.
(1988). Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
37.
Giddens, A.
(1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure, and contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
38.
Gilbert, G. N.
, & Mulkay, M. (1984). Opening Pandora's box: A sociological analysis of scientists' discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
39.
Goffman, E.
(1983). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
40.
Goodwin, C.
, & Duranti, A. (1992). Rethinking context: An introduction. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon (pp. 1-42). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
41.
Gusfield, J. R.
(1992). Listening for the silences: The rhetorics of the research field. In R. H. Brown (Ed.), Writing the social text: Poetics and politics in social science discourse (pp. 117-134). New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
42.
Harding, S.
(1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
43.
Harris, J.
(1989). The idea of community in the study of writing. College Composition and Communication, 40, 11-37.
44.
Heath, S. B.
(1982). What no bedtime story means. Language in Society, 11, 49-76.
45.
Heath, S. B.
(1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
46.
Hymes, D.
(1971). Competence and performance in linguistic theory. In R. Huxley & E. Ingram (Eds.), Language acquisition: Models and methods (pp. 3-28). London: Academic Press.
47.
Hymes, D.
(1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
48.
Jacoby, S.
, & Gonzales, P. (1991). The constitution of expert-novice in scientific discourse. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 2, 148-181.
49.
Kamberelis, G.
, & Scott, K. D. (1992). Other people's voices: The coarticulation of texts and subjectivities. Linguistics and Education, 4, 359-403.
50.
Klein, J.
(1990). Interdisciplinarity: History, theory, and practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
51.
Knorr-Cetina, K. D.
(1981). The manufacture of knowledge. Oxford: Pergamon.
52.
Landau, M.
(1991). Narratives of human evolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
53.
Larson, R. L.
(1984). Classifying discourse: Limitations and alternatives. In R. J. Connors, L. S. Ede, & A. A. Lunsford (Eds.), Essays on classical rhetoric and modern discourse (pp. 203-214). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
54.
Latour, B.
(1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
55.
Latour, B.
, & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1979)
56.
Lave, J.
, & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
57.
LeFevre, K. B.
(1987). Invention as a social act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
58.
Leont'ev, A. N.
(1981). Problems in the development of mind. Moscow: Progress.
59.
McGinley, W.
, & Tierney, R. J. (1989). Traversing the topical landscape: Reading and writing as ways of knowing. Written Communication, 6, 243-269.
60.
Michaels, S.
(1987). Text and context: A new approach to the study of classroom writing. Discourse Processes, 10, 321-346.
61.
Minick, N.
, Stone, C., & Forman, E. (1993). Introduction: Integration of individual, social, and institutional processes in accounts of children's learning and development. In E. Forman, N. Minick, & C. Stone (Eds.), Contexts for learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children's development (pp. 3-16). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
62.
Myers, G.
(1990). Writing biology: Texts in the social construction of scientific knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
63.
Nystrand, M.
(1982). Rhetoric's “audience” and lingustics' “speech community”: Implications for understanding writing, reading, and text. In M. Nystrand (Ed.), What writers know: The language, process, and structure of written discourse. New York: Academic Press.
64.
Nystrand, M.
, & Brandt, D. (1989). Response to writing as a context for learning to write. In C. M. Anson (Ed.), Writing and response: Theory, practice, and research (pp. 209-230). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
65.
Ochs, E.
, Jacoby, S., & Gonzales, P. (in press). Interpretive journeys: How physicists talk and travel through graphic space. Configurations.
66.
Ochs, E.
, Smith, R., & Taylor, C. (1989). Detective stories at dinnertime: Problem-solving through co-narration. Cultural Dynamics, 2, 238-257.
67.
Ochs, E.
, Taylor, C., Rudolph, D., & Smith, R. (1992). Storytelling as a theory-building activity. Discourse Processes, 15, 37-72.
68.
Odell, L.
, Goswami, D., & Herrington, A. (1983). The discourse-based interview: A procedure for exploring the tacit knowledge of writers in non-academic settings. In P. Mosenthal, L. Tamor, & S. Walmsley (Eds.), Research on writing (pp. 221-236). New York: Longman.
69.
Patterson, J.
, & McCubbin, H. (1987). Adolescent coping style and behaviors: Conceptualization and measurement. Journal of Adolescence, 10, 163-186
70.
Phelps, L.
(1990). Audience and authorship: The disappearing boundary. In G. Kirsch & D. H. Roen (Eds.), A sense of audience in written communication (pp. 153-174). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
71.
Prior, P.
(1991). Contextualizing writing and response in a graduate seminar. Written Communication, 8, 267-310.
72.
Prior, P.
(in press). Redefining the task: An ethnographic examination of writing and response in graduate seminars. In D. Belcher & G. Braine (Eds.), Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
73.
Ricouer, P.
(1974). The conflict of interpretations: Essays in hermeneutics (D. Ihde, Ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
74.
Spiro, R. J.
, Feltovich, P., Coulson, R., & Anderson, D. K. (1989). Multiple analogies for complex concepts. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 498-531). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
75.
Spiro, R. J.
, Vispoel, W., Schmitz, J., Samarapungavan, A., & Boerger, A. E. (1987). Knowledge acquisition for application: Cognitive flexibility and transfer in complex domains. In B. Britton & S. Glynn (Eds.), Executive control processes in reading (pp. 174-194). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
76.
Swales, J. M.
(1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
77.
Tannen, D.
(1989). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
78.
Voloshinov, V. N.
(1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language (L. Matejka & I. R. Titunik, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
79.
Vygotsky, L.
(1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
80.
Vygotsky, L.
(1987). Thinking and speech (N. Minick, Ed. & Trans.). New York: Plenum.
81.
Walvoord, B. E.
, & McCarthy, L. P. (1990). Thinking and writing in college: A naturalistic study of students in four disciplines. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
82.
Wertsch, J. V.
(1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
83.
Wertsch, J. V.
, & Minick, N. (1990). Negotiating sense in the zone of proximal development. In M. Schwebel, C. A. Maher, & N. S. Fagley (Eds.), Promoting cognitive growth over the life span (pp. 71-88). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
84.
Wertsch, J. V.
, Tulviste, P., & Hagstrom, F. (1993). A sociocultural approach to agency. In E. Forman, N. Minick, & C. Stone (Eds.), Contexts for learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children's development (pp. 336-356). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
