The focus of this blog post will be to interpret the three texts: Our Discourse Community Values, What is Literacy by James Paul Gee, and We Are Many by Pablo Neruda. It will also answer the question of how these three texts speak to the identity of our English class discourse community.
James Paul Gee discusses discourse communities through the lens of a scholar. I think that what he says has a lot of application to our discourse community because it is a primarily academic one. Gee says that discourse communities are inherently ideological. I think this fits with our discourse community because ours is based in learning. Values that everyone in our discourse community holds are in the Discourse Community Values and also include being in the class and learning together. Secondly he states that discourse communities are resistant to internal criticism. While this seems to be an unnecessary claim, I personally think it is important. I think this claim sets the boundaries of our discourse community. Once you are against the base values of discourse community then you are not part of it anymore. James Paul Gee also says that the discourse-defined position of yourself is also influenced by other discourses. The way I understand this claim is that discourse communities that you are currently part of and have been a part of in the past all have an influence on your position in this discourse community. We somewhat discussed this in class when we talked about My Name is Margaret. We discussed how you bring all of your past experiences with you wherever you go. I think that is an important realization to make about ourselves as well as the discourse communities we belong to. This claim that Gee makes is important for being considerate to everyone in the discourse community. It is important to understand that our discourse community could be in direct conflict with other discourse communities that members of ours are a part of. I think this is more apparent with hate groups however. The last part of his statement about discourse communities says that they are closely “related to the distribution of social power”. I think that this aspect of discourse communities has little effect on ours. In his poem, Pablo Neruda talks about his many selves and how they manifest themselves when he is talking to different people. In his poem he says whenever he is set up to look smart he says something stupid and ruins it. He is trying to say that he brings what he knows from everywhere he has been into the conversation he is having currently, whether it be a positive or negative thing for the group. He also talks about how when he writes, he gets so lost in his writing that he kind of maps out who he is as a person. I think that is why he is saying he will speak of geography in the end. This ties to our discourse community because of how we bring our lives into the classroom and exit with what we have written and understood about ourselves.
2 Comments
Sabatino
3/27/2019 07:34:44 am
I appreciate the concise interpretation of the texts. I notice you make connections between these texts and their values of our discourse community. If you had to name the shared themes, what would they be? If you had to name the genre of this piece, what would you call it?
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“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all: Read a lot and write a lot”
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