Discourse Communities Complicated

In "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing," Joseph Harris attempts to look at the word "community" and see how it might be a problematic phrasing. He finds that it is too vague- that it encompasses too many different ideas for too many people. On one hand, community has a warm fuzzy connotation and can be invoked rhetorically to try to make people feel like they are a part of something good. While use of "community" in this way can be problematic, he says that it can also be a powerful way to unite people who have chosen to gather together. "The sort of group invoked is a free and voluntary gathering of individuals with shared goals and interests: of persons who have not so much been forced together as have chosen to associate with one another." (586). Overall, Harris seems to push for this idea of conglomerate personal discourses. I mean that, instead of making students jump from one discourse to another, writing instructors should encourage each student to think of writing as adding to the language that they already know. Harris says, "It seems to me that they might better be encouraging towards a kind of polyphony- an awareness of and pleasure in the various competing discourses that make up their own." Harris also challenges the idea that communities have to be consensual. He says that it is the competing ideas and beliefs that push a community to change, and that we are therefore better off viewing academic discourse communities as a "polyglot."

Johns speaks of the ways in which one's different communities might come into conflict with one another. In the first part of the article, she explains how there are different levels of communities that we belong to. In the second, more interesting part, she focuses on academic discourse communities and the ways in which they butt heads with one's other communities. In some instances, people may become isolated from their families and home cultures upon assimilating into the academic discourse communities. They may have to give up some of the ways of speaking, values, and attitudes from their old community that may have shaped who they are. She also talks about how we must encourage students entering into the discourse to seek out rhetorical strategies for establishing authority, so that they, too, might grow to have some authority in their work. She urges that discussion also be opened up about the conventions and anticonventions of a particular genre, so that students know when they should push the limits and when to hold back.

These authors don't really reject the notion of discourse communities, they just want to explore how complicated they really are. Harris seems to be seeking a sort of redefinition of discourse communities, one that everyone can get on board with, so that discussion about discourse communities might be less sporadic. Johns definitely does not argue that discourse communities do not exist, but instead that we do more to help those entering specific discourse communities understand how the power dynamics and rhetoric of these communities work, so that they can establish their own sort of authority and contribute in a thoughtful way.

These articles didn't change my feelings on discourse communities very much because I felt as though they harped more on the "definition," which is a discussion that I think the people in that field need to figure out before I read more about it. I liked that Johns brought up some of the downsides of discourse communities, because that may be something that I will face when I enter a particular discourse community.

I feel as though we have spent so much time reading these articles because they pertain to our immediate futures very directly. We are involved in the "college" discourse community, which is interesting to tear apart, but we are moving into totally unknown territory- the "professional" world. These articles have given us a lot to think about. We must think about how we will have to adapt in order to fit into this new world, and what these adaptations will mean for our identities. I have learned that just to get a job in a world that is unfamiliar to me has a lot more going on under the surface than I would suspect, and that I need to be much more aware of the way in which I am presenting and compromising who I have become up to this point in order to fit into a certain world. It has made me think twice about entering the professional world, for I hope more than ever to find a way to avoid it.