What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
The notion of "reader functions" is particularly intriguing
when applied to teachers, I think, for it gives us a strong
interpretive frame for interrogating the way we function as
gatekeeper when
we read for grades, and so on. Indeed, the thrust of
Foucauldian analysis--up until his very latest works--was toward
demonstrating the futility of dwelling on questions like "who
writes?" and "who responds?," showing over and over again the ways
in which the larger discourses of society craft both what we think
we write and how we think we read and/or respond. Thus far I have
been sketching in very rapidly some of the theoretical work in
literary and composition studies that has challenged traditional
conceptions of who writes and who responds. (Example: how much of
this essay am "I" writing? How much is Lisa writing with me? How
much is Becky? Michael? How much of this essay comes from the
words and work
of Foucault and others? How much comes from my taking on the role
assigned to me: keynote speaker? How much comes from the language
of the academy, the conventions of academic discourse that lead me
to stay "on topic" instead of veering off to tell you about my most
current worries and fears and sadnesses? Second example: how much
of "my" response to our reading of this conference is shaped and
coded by what is acceptable and what is not; by what kinds of
subjects are valued in our field and what kinds are not....and so
on?) But beyond the examples I've just provided, and beyond the
mostly theoretical work in our field of English studies, the
electronic revolution presents massive challenges to received
notions of autonomous, free-willed, stable, uniquely creative
"authors" and equally autonomous, free-willed, stable, uniquely
creative "readers" or "responders." Indeed, in cyberspace,
reader/responder and author/writer often merge, voices collapse and
multiply, often belonging to no single source--or even to a person,
and familiar notions of textuality and especially of where meaning
resides are all called into question. In many ways, the traditional
labels of "reader," "writer," and "text" don't even name useful
distinctions anymore. In a long and fascinating essay in the
current issue of Wired, for example, Esther Dyson argues that
value will no longer reside in content (text) or in the producer of
the content (author) or even in the user of the content
(reader)--but in the relationships surrounding and nurturing the
movement of content through networks of users and producers (182-84).
Next *
Previous
Postmodern (un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions