Synthesizing Bean with Fahnestock and Secor Through Bauman

First, I'd like to thank the many of you who have given me well-wishes and have offered to help--I really do appreciate it. Things are stabilizing for me and this post marks the beginning of a significant uptick in my participation on the blog, for better or worse.

So, one thing I considered after reading Fahnestock and Secor is how what they have to say about assumptions in argument can be related to what Bean had to say about writing across the disciplines and students' bifurcated view of writing. Bean describes this view in terms of the assumption made by many students that "a writing teacher has no business criticizing one's ideas ('This is a writing class!') just as a history or science or philosophy teacher has no business criticizing one's writing ('This is not a writing class!')" (16). Bean puts it nicely I think when he says that students often think of writing as "packaging," "Separated from the act of thinking and creating" and so "writing becomes merely a skill that can be learned through grammar drills and through the production of pointless essays that students do not want to write and that teachers do not want to read" (ibid). This initial discussion in the reading assignments out of Bean stuck with me, and as I was reading Fahnestock and Secor and thinking about how they also argue, in a way, that there are some similarities between disciplines in terms of how one writes (mirroring Bean's discussion of the writing-across-the-curriculum approach). Fahnestock and Secor locate such similiarties in their comparison of the use of stases in scientific and literary writing in terms of the *assumptions* writers in each discipline share. As Fahnestock and Secor assert, "argments within a discipline usually assume the vallue of addressing certain subjects in a certain stases. That is what it means to write within a discipline" (70). They then go on to outline how both writers in literary studies and in science assume that their audience shares certain values--"Arguments in literary criticism do not spend time convincing readers that the works of Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and Emerson are worth reexamining" just as "arguments in science usually bypass explicit justification of the stasis of and content of their approach... in either science or literary studies, anyone who addresses a discipline in ways it does not recognize in effect tries to change that discipline or splinters off into a new one" (ibid).

Resisting my (strong) urge to discuss Thomas Kuhn (who Fahnestock and Secor mention) here, I'll instead bring in something else which I was actually thinking about last week when Dr. Strickland brought up the work of George Lakoff (_Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate_ and _Metaphors We Live By_, which he co-authored with Mark Johnson--by the way, I also recommend _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind). One key concept for Lakoff (along with conceptual metaphor and the embodied mind) is framing, as Dr. Strickland discussed. Discussing Lakoff's concept of framing brought to mind for me another concept of framing, that of Richard Bauman, and that's what came to mind again for me as I read Fahnestock and Secor. One of Bauman's key works is _The Verbal Art of Performance_ (the folklore folks will probably know this one--we use it in Anthro and Linguistics, too), and in it, he deals (as the title suggests) with the nature of verbal performance, but I think one can find it useful (or, alternately, completely tangential) to substitute *writing* for performance and that doing so could illuminate what they have to say about stases.

For Bauman, performance involves the performer, the audience and the setting (much like Fahnestock and Secor's discussion of writing and argument). The setting (or for writing, the nature of the publication, say--_Science_ vs. _PMLA_), of course, often cues an audience that what they are about to see/hear/read is going to be a certain kind of performance (or a cetain kind of writing). There is also an assumption of cultural comptencey on the part of the audience--they recognize certain cues which will foreground or call special attention to certain aspects of the performance. The performer/writer uses these cues--special codes, formulas, figarutive language and other stylistic devices, fluctations in voice, etc.--to create an interpretive frame for the audience/reader: "Performance sets up, or represents, an interpretative frame within which the messages being communicated are to be understood..." and "All framing, including performance, is accomplished through the employment of culturally conventionalized metacommunication." So the setting for a performance/reading cues the audience/reader, and the performer/writer sets up an interpretative frame for audience/reader using cultural conventions that *key* for them that what is to follow is a performance or writing within a certain genre or discipline. An audience at a comedy club, for example, is cued by the setting to know that the performance they are about to see will involve jokes, and the comedian will frame a joke using certain cultural conventions to cue the audience that what they are about hear is the beginning of a joke (or the punchline). Seinfeld, for example, is in/famous for starting his jokes/observations with "Did you ever notice..." or "What's the deal with...".

Framing arguments--both in the sense that Lakoff uses the term and the sense that Bauman uses it--can work in tandem, I feel, with the stases of arguments as Fahnestock and Secor outline them (facts, definitions, causes, values, proposals—or procedure or policy) to help lay the foundation for a writing-across-the-curriculum orientation.