Conversations of Thought :: Conversating Thinking thoughts Essays

Conversations of ThoughtThere are written and read conversations taking place this very moment. The written conversation is ane that happens among 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 on that point are some going on in collegiate assembly halls, and in the conscious minds of many. However, I cannotnor can you at the momentread (make turn over youre not reading this right now---oops, Ive just Onged you) or hear most of these arguments, debates, agreements, disagreements, assertions that carry on. If that is true we are fine for the moment. Granted, one is standing adjacent to and overhearing an English seminar that is discussing and synthesizing the views and works of a range of the most influential modern theorists of the humanities and social sciences. This confined seminar (audience) is expected to interact with, value, debate, and/ or construct opinions for or against a textthus leading some to new thought-conversational thought processes. This, however, excludes the standby-audience member, the reader-listener, as an active participant of the dominant- creatoritative discourse from that seminar. Hence, the authors (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 write, chew out and think about texts. This notion does not stand aloneparadoxically speaking 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 fi nd confluence in central arguments made by Ong, Bartholomae and Foucault that are worth mentioning. I am not disputing the rhetoric of these three great thinkers/ readers. I am simply attempting to learn a position of privilege, a position that sets me against a common discourse working self-consciously, critically, against not only 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.