Conversations of Thought :: Conversating Thinking thoughts Essays

Conversations of ThoughtThere argon written and read conferences taking place this very moment. The written conversation is one that happens between me (ongoing thought- conversation) and what is written onto paper. The read conversation takes place when a person, other than me, picks up what Ive written and reads it. Thought-conversation is going on in my writing to you today there are some going on in collegiate assembly halls, and in the conscious minds of many. However, I screwnotnor can you at the momentread (make believe youre not interpreting this right now---oops, Ive just Onged you) or hear nigh of these arguments, debates, agreements, disagreements, assertions that carry on. If that is true we are fine for the moment. Granted, one is standing coterminous to and overhearing an English seminar that is discussing and synthesizing the views and works of a range of the most influential sophisticated theorists of the humanities and social sciences. This confined seminar (a udience) is expected to interact with, value, debate, and/ or nominate opinions for or against a textthus leading some to saucily thought-conversational thought processes. This, however, excludes the secondary-audience member, the reader-listener, as an active participant of the dominant- designeritative discourse from that seminar. Hence, the causes (the professor) methodology creates a specific, yet unrestrained, aimed-towards them discourse and not for the standby reader-listener. His audience (who says that an audience is his anyway?) will have to later publish, talk and think about texts. This notion does not stand altogetherparadoxically come up toing of the standby reader-listener who is standing alone and adjacent to the seminar. These standby reader-listeners arent intentionally or even, in this case, fictionally given the right to speak in this confined pre-registered, fore-planned discourse. Likewise, they arent fictionally thought of as potential readers. With this analogy, I find confluence in central arguments made by Ong, Bartholomae and Foucault that are worth mentioning. I am not disputing the rhetoric of these three gravid thinkers/ readers. I am simply attempting to define a position of privilege, a position that sets me against a common discourse working self-consciously, critically, against not solely the common code but my own (Bartholomae 644). However, for now, I am suggesting that a reader doesnt have to play the role in which the author has cast him (Ong 60), but that there is more to it.